Manifest Injustice (44 page)

On the other hand, she thought the evidence about Valenzuela’s statements—only now provided to her by the Justice Project—had great import. She felt “disgusted that the jury was not told about Ernest Valenzuela and his confessions.” To her mind, “this information would have had a huge impact on the jury’s decision.” At the least, she was “sure that it would have caused the jury to have reasonable doubt about Bill Macumber’s guilt.”

As the trial went along, her opinion about Bill Macumber quickly changed. Rather than “really creepy,” she came to think him “just a regular guy who was caught up in a set of very surreal circumstances.” To her, “he came across as a gentleman.” He “sat straight up in court,” with no demeanor of a prisoner, no criminal history. She could not fathom why such an upstanding member of the community would “go out and shoot two young kids randomly without any reason whatsoever.” In her view, “people just don’t do things like that on a ‘whim.’” She had assumed the other jurors shared her outlook, so she “was stunned with shock” when she heard the verdict. She could not then or now understand how the other jurors found him guilty—“I strongly believe there was reasonable doubt about his guilt.”

Leaving Lisa Piercefield’s house with a signed and notarized affidavit in hand, Katie thought, “Too bad she wasn’t on the voting jury.” A simple twist of fate.

*   *   *

Above all others, the person Katie, Lindsay, and Sarah most wanted to interview was Carol’s former roommate, Frieda Kennedy. Frieda had given depositions before each trial and had testified at the second one. She’d also talked once to Rich Robertson, a decade ago. But she’d always been reluctant and vague, never forthcoming. Maybe now she’d talk openly. Maybe she’d feel more comfortable talking to “two young girls”—as Katie and Lindsay called themselves—rather than lawyers and private investigators in suits. Frieda had been the person closest to Carol back then. Frieda, they sensed, could be the key.

Working off Rich Robertson’s old notes, Katie and Lindsay came up with what seemed to be her last known address, still out in Buckeye. Before driving there, they met at the Justice Project offices to pore through Frieda’s depositions. Then they climbed into Katie’s Honda Civic. Buckeye sat some forty miles to the west of Phoenix, well beyond the urban sprawl. Katie and Lindsay took I-10 west, passing the prison for women in Goodyear, then headed south on State Highway 85. Pulling into Buckeye, they drove past vacant lots interrupted only occasionally by a housing development or shopping center, rising in isolation. The address they had for Frieda took them to a dirt road amid farmland, then a moderate-sized home surrounded by a fence. They climbed out of their car into a howling wind, strange for Arizona. They both were dressed down, as usual—just jeans and casual tops. A guard dog started barking ferociously. That and the fence kept them from knocking on the front door, so they yelled out their hellos, hoping someone would emerge. A woman appeared. We’re looking for Frieda Turner, they explained, using Frieda’s married name. No, the woman said, she doesn’t live here. The Turners lived down the road, last she knew, but she couldn’t say if they still did.

Katie and Lindsay faced into the wind, fighting their way back to the Honda Civic. They drove to where the woman had pointed. There they found two well-sized homes on the same lot, one in front of the other, newly built. They went to the back house first and knocked. No answer. At the front house, the doormat featured a capital T, so they figured they might be in the right place. When they knocked, a woman opened the door. No, she said, Frieda Turner used to live here, in the rear house, but she moved. Last she’d heard, Frieda was living somewhere in Buckeye with a man named Boyd Pierce.

Back inside their car, they did an Internet search on Katie’s BlackBerry for “Boyd Pierce + Buckeye.” Bingo—a hit. They had an address. Lindsay guided as Katie drove slowly through an unfamiliar region. They missed a couple of turns and circled around for a while. This was an older neighborhood, not on a par with their first stops. The few small, worn homes out here looked to them as if they might be abandoned or harbor a meth lab. Pulling up to Frieda’s home at the end of a cul-de-sac, Katie and Lindsay saw a ragtag lot with trash and toys scattered about. Neither of them wanted to get out of the car. Katie said, No, let’s not. Lindsay said, Yes, let’s. Even as they walked up to the house, they still debated. Maybe, Katie suggested, we should let Rich do this? With trepidation, they knocked. Frieda opened the door. Katie thought her kind of cute-looking—a fifty-six-year-old woman now, short and plump, with frosted hair—but a bit worn, with food on her shirt and a messy house behind her. She warmly welcomed them into her home.

During that first visit, they talked for one hour. Frieda wasn’t always clear about things—she tended to say, “Maybe” and “Yeah, hmmm” and “I think I remember, but I don’t know.” But when they pressed her for specifics, she grew more precise. Frieda wasn’t reluctant or guarded with them, as she had been with the men in suits. The passage of time possibly helped as well. Slowly at first, then more easily, she began to talk about her time with Carol. She told of working with Carol at the sheriff’s department, together on the night shift in the identification department. She told of Carol, on several nights around the time of Bill’s arrest, showing her the Sterrenberg-McKillop case file, which included the fingerprint cards. She told of becoming very good friends with Carol—Carol, in fact, had been Frieda’s closest girlfriend at the time. Frieda was twenty then. Coming from a sheltered upbringing, living away from her parents for the first time, she looked up to Carol, thirty-one, “because she liked to have a good time and she had more life experience than me.” In the summer of 1974, they became roommates, renting an apartment on Fifty-eighth Avenue, Frieda since she hated commuting from Buckeye, Carol given that she was “unhappy at home because her marriage to Bill had gone sour.”

Katie wanted to go slow with Frieda, but had to ask: Did Carol have affairs during this time? Oh yes, Frieda said, with no hesitation, no searching of her memory. She named two men right off: Dennis Gilbertson and Gerald Hayes. They talked on from there, Katie taking notes, but once they had the outlines of Frieda’s account, they began making plans for a return visit. They’d just been breaking the ice on this trip. They would bring Sarah Cooper with them next time.

*   *   *

When they arrived for their second visit, the vacant lots and tumbleweeds made Sarah feel way out on an edge, stranded in a wilderness. Yet when they stepped inside Frieda’s home, they again were warmly welcomed. Frieda treated Katie and Lindsay as if she’d known them all her life. She poured them iced tea as they settled at the dining room table. She had cleaned up the house now and put herself together.

She had also, apparently, done some thinking, some recollecting. Before they began to question her, before she sat down, Frieda, unprompted, said, “Carol told me she ‘went by the house and shot.’” That caught them way off guard. They’d been planning to ask her about the kitchen-window shooting, but later, easing into it. Now here was Frieda bringing it up herself, out of nowhere, at the top of the conversation. Katie asked, “Can you repeat that?” Frieda did, but then began to grow vague—her usual manner of speech. Such a process to get an affidavit, Sarah thought. Still—Frieda had volunteered this, she’d said it: “Carol told me she ‘went by the house and shot.’”

For several hours that day, and over a series of later phone conversations, they walked Frieda through her memories, everyone taking notes. They didn’t have to cajole her, though they did sometimes press her to be precise. She wanted to help. Eventually, Sarah collected all the notes and drafted Frieda’s affidavit, distilling five hours of conversation into six pages. Katie and Lindsay, with Lindsay’s notary public father in tow, made one more trip to Frieda’s home. On October 11, 2010, she reviewed, then signed her statement.

In it, event by event, Frieda recounted her experiences with Carol. When they moved in together, Frieda recalled, Carol’s three children stayed with Bill, and “she did not seem at all concerned about this arrangement.” Frieda thought nothing of it herself, since “Carol had told me Bill was a good father.” Besides, “I had seen it for myself. Before Carol and I moved in together, I had visited the house she shared with Bill and her three sons more than ten times. I also spent the night there on a few occasions. From what I saw, Bill was the one who took care of the kids; he would play with them and cook meals. He was the better parent. Carol didn’t seem to care as much. Bill was a very nice man—courteous and kind. In no way, shape or form was Bill the type of man who would ‘come on’ to you, unlike most of the guys I worked with at MCSO. It was also clear that Bill loved Carol because he would do whatever she wanted. I do not believe that feeling was reciprocated by Carol.” Frieda continued:

It is my strong opinion that their marriage broke down because Carol wanted a man that was bigger and better than Bill. In my opinion this meant someone with more money, better physical looks and who worked in law enforcement. Carol had affairs with men like this while she was married to Bill.

When I worked at the MCSO in 1973 and 1974, the environment was very friendly. A number of us would socialize and fraternize outside of the office. The office rules prohibited fraternizing with colleagues but most employees paid little attention to them. The MCSO was like a big playhouse. The deputies would hit on the girls that worked in the office, telling us we looked pretty and asking us to go out to coffee after work.… Going out for coffee was sometimes used as an innuendo for having a relationship. For a young woman like me, who was away from her parents for the first time, the MCSO was a fun place to be.

I believe Carol thrived in the playhouse environment. She knew a lot of people, mostly men, and she loved the attention they would give to her. To the best of my knowledge, Carol, while she was married to Bill, had affairs with Phoenix Police Officer Dennis Gilbertson and MCSO Patrolman Jerry Hayes.… I am confident that Dennis and Jerry did not know about each other, and I am sure Bill knew nothing about Carol’s relationship with either of them.

I also suspect that Carol had a relationship with MCSO Sergeant Ed Calles. Carol had a crush on Sergeant Calles and the two of them would go out for coffee quite often. In fact, they seemed sneaky about it; only a few people knew they went out together. It is my belief that they were sneaky about their meetings because the MCSO prohibited fraternizing with colleagues and they were both married at the time.

It was an unspoken rule that I would not tell anyone about Carol’s relationships. I believe the reason for this rule was because Carol was married. That said, I do not think Carol was fearful of Bill Macumber finding out about her affairs. I think Carol just saw Bill as a “country bumpkin” kind of guy. He was a nice, even-tempered man and Carol knew it. Carol was not shy at all. She was charismatic, persuasive, and wasn’t very fearful of anything. She had a persona of a “come on” type personality. It appeared she could easily get the guys at work to do things for her.

Sometimes rumors about who Carol was sleeping with would spread around the MCSO. I would say her reputation would be best described as “loose and easy.” Around August 1974, Carol was called to Paul Blubaum’s office. Paul Blubaum was the Sheriff of Maricopa County at this time. As an employee of the MCSO, you knew you were in real trouble if the Sheriff called you to his office. I remember standing in the hallway with her as she waited to be called in to the Sheriff’s office, and she said that if she was fired she would “take twenty people down with her.” I took this to mean that Carol would get those people fired too because she had something on those people. I suspected that “something” was the fact they had been fraternizing with her and other colleagues. Carol did not come across as scared when she said this to me—she would do whatever she needed to do in order to sort things out.… Carol always made shrewd decisions and was devious in her own way. She seemed to know what she was doing and most of the time she had a plan.…

In August 1974, when Carol and I were living together, and around the same time as Carol had been called into Sheriff Blubaum’s office, I recall that there was a shooting incident at Bill Macumber’s house. To the best of my recollection, Carol told me that she “went by the house and shot.” I took this to mean that she had fired the shot into Bill’s house. It also seems that she told me someone else was with her when the shot was fired. I suspect Carol would have done something like that because she wanted out of her marriage bad.… We trusted each other and did not keep secrets from each other. I told Carol everything. This is why I believe she told me about her involvement in this incident.

The same week as the shooting incident, while we were at our apartment, Carol said she wanted to talk to me about something she had not told anyone else before. She said “this is going to sound far-fetched” and then told me that, some time earlier, Bill had confessed to her that he had killed the two kids out in Scottsdale in 1962. I was shocked.… The story kind of came out of the blue, but Carol said she told me because she was scared that Bill would come and get her because he knew she had fired the shot into his house. I was petrified. Bill was an even-tempered person and I was shocked when Carol told me this story.…

After this I decided that it was not a good idea for me to live with Carol … I did not want to live with her anymore. I realized that I was in “way above my head.” … Not long after Carol reported Bill to the MCSO, I moved back to Buckeye to live with my parents.… A couple of weeks or months after I moved back to Buckeye, I was in Phoenix and called Carol to meet for lunch. Carol was busy and could not meet me. I never heard from her again. To this day, I have not had any further contact with Carol.

*   *   *

They had possible new evidence now. Frieda, above all. The two jurors—reasonable fact finders, swayed by what they’d learned. Dennis Gilbertson and Gerald Hayes, undercutting Carol’s credibility. Tom O’Toole, going deeper, reliving the past. But did they have enough to sustain a PCR petition? As Sarah Cooper began to pull together a draft for Larry Hammond’s consideration, the Justice Project team weighed that question. Rule 32 posed such tough hurdles. They couldn’t just collect all the impeachment evidence into a narrative. They needed new evidence that would kick out not one but all three pillars of the case: prints, shell casings, Carol’s statement. They needed new evidence with verdict-changing capacity.