Murder in Little Egypt (40 page)

The Eldorado defense fund had raised thirty-eight thousand dollars, twelve thousand short of the amount needed to cover Margulis’s expenses and fee; but Margulis was willing to proceed. Dale wrote many, many letters home to southern Illinois thanking and encouraging his supporters and bolstering their belief in his innocence. In his bold hand, a cross between script and printing notable for the long tails on the
f’
s which carried downward into the following line, he wrote of his initial panic and confusion at being arrested. He felt like a drop of water, he said, going down the drain, as if he had been in “a sort of psychodelic [
sic
] vortex,” and he worried about how confused all his friends and patients must have been. But the letters, calls, cards and notes from all the “Rudies” had cleared his mind. If he failed of eloquence in expressing his gratitude, he would have to blame his English teachers, he said lightly. In some of the letters he digressed about his fellow prisoners, the nut cases, the blacks who could not read the newspaper, one man who, Dale said, looked exactly like Jack Nicholson after shock therapy in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. One inmate liked to take showers with his clothes on; another was indignant that the police had taken away his cocaine. Since the
People
magazine story, he had been receiving letters of encouragement from all over the country, but the most important to him were from southern Illinois. The love he was feeling from everyone was keeping him from being bitter and depressed.

Some of the recipients of these letters talked to the press about them, saying how glad they were that the doctor was in such good spirits. Emma Lou Mitchell, Dale’s faithful nurse, wrote to him every other day. But Dale, in an epistolary frenzy that lasted throughout the entire period of his incarceration, sent letters to many people who were not pleased to hear from him and considered his postal onslaught nothing more than an attempt to manipulate the public in the hope of influencing the outcome of his trial.

Dale wrote to a friend of Eddie Miller’s, wishing her well, asking her to please give his regards to Eddie, and signing off by saying that all things were possible in Christ. The letter, written on stationery decorated with a cartoon of Garfield the cat, repelled its recipient who, well-known to be active in her church, considered its closing burst of piety transparently false; it certainly did not impress Eddie Miller, who shuddered at the idea of what the doctor was thinking about him. A doctor who had been a medical-school classmate of Dale’s and was now a specialist in St. Louis received one of Dale’s letters, which included a request for a donation to the defense fund. The St. Louis physician, who happened to be a friend and golfing buddy of Arthur Margulis, was disgusted. He had despised Dale in school as a belligerent know-it-all and had a low regard for Dale’s professional competence. Dale had been referring patients to him for years and, like several other St. Louis specialists, he had the impression that Dr. Cavaness cared more about cattle than people, if the number of misdiagnoses among his referrals was any guide. Playing golf with Margulis one day, the St. Louis doctor told the lawyer that he did not envy his having Dale Cavaness as a client. He would find him very difficult to deal with. Dale was a guy, the doctor said, who thought he knew more about everything than anyone else did. He would try to tell Margulis how to handle his case. Margulis, who never talked about his clients to anyone except his wife, did not reply.

Publicly Margulis expressed his confidence that Dr. Cavaness would gain an acquittal, pleading innocent to the charge of capital murder. In Missouri capital murder was defined by section 565.001 of the penal code:

Any person who unlawfully, willfully, knowingly, deliberately, and with premeditation kills or causes the killing of another human being is guilty of the offense of capital murder. . . . Persons convicted of the offense of capital murder shall, if the judge or jury so recommends . . . be punished by death. If the judge or jury does not recommend the imposition of the death penalty on a finding of guilty of capital murder, the convicted person shall be punished by imprisonment by the division of corrections during his natural life and shall not be eligible for probation or parole until he had served a minimum of fifty years of his sentence.

There was in Missouri, in other words, no way out for someone convicted of capital murder—no forgiveness, no possibility of parole for at least fifty years, no chance of swaying a parole board by being a model prisoner and behaving as if one were rehabilitated, no advantage to finding Jesus behind bars. If Dale was found guilty, he would either die in the gas chamber or wait for his first parole hearing at the age of a hundred and nine.

As a defendant, Dale had as his strongest suit his credibility as a doctor and the extraordinary nature of the crime with which he was charged. Could twelve impartial jurors believe that a successful man who had devoted his career to saving lives would stoop to murdering his son for insurance money? Against him would be the testimony of his own family and the ballistics which, as Steve Goldman would argue, showed that he had shot his son twice in the head.

Jury selection began on Monday, July 8, in Clayton at the St. Louis County Courthouse, a large, modern building that contained the prosecutor’s offices as well as those of all the other legal officials of the county. Goldman and Margulis took only a day and a half to agree on a jury of nine women and three men. Neither man believed in courtroom theatrics nor in so-called scientific jury selection: You challenged those obviously hostile to your side, excluded those who said that they could not vote for the death penalty, and took your chances. Judge Margaret Nolan scheduled the opening arguments for Tuesday afternoon. Margulis and Goldman agreed that the trial should last about a week.

In court Dale appeared haggard and drawn. He had lost a lot of weight in jail; his dark suit fit loosely. Standing and sitting side by side, he and Margulis formed a striking contrast. At fifty Margulis, who was two or three inches taller than his client, looked fifteen or twenty years younger than Dale. Margulis was vigorous, athletic, fashionably dressed and handsome, his sky-blue eyes and thick silvery hair his most striking features; Dale, in the words of Jack Nolen, who was present in the courtroom with his wife, looked like a bad stretch of nine-mile road. Apparently his lawyer had been unable to spruce him up.

Dave Barron, who was prepared to testify and was present throughout the trial, told Nolen during a recess that the main thing to worry about was Art Margulis, not Dale Cavaness. He knew Margulis and respected him. After receiving his law degree from Washington University and before beginning his criminal defense practice, Margulis had joined the F.B.I. on the East Coast, back in the days when agents had to be either lawyers or accountants. He was possibly the most skillful defense lawyer in St. Louis, but the cops held him in high regard because he was honest, would never pull anything unethical and relied on his brains rather than theatrics to sway a jury. In hiring Margulis, T. R. Murphy had shown more savvy than Barron would have credited to him. That Margulis had four sons, just like the doc, was an interesting coincidence. The difference was that all four of Margulis’s boys were in good health.

But in this ball game Dave Barron was betting on Steve Goldman, who was just as smart as Margulis and this time had the stronger case. The ballistics evidence would show that the doc had blown Sean away, snuck up behind him while he was standing beside the car and shot him once, then shot him again as he lay already dead on the ground. And the doc’s lies to the police would work against him. Thank God for the Kroecks and their fabulous grocery bag. If it weren’t for them, the doc might be in southern Illinois, cutting people up and screwing widow-women. Barron just prayed that the doc’s family, who were scheduled to take the stand, could hold up. He was especially worried about Marian.

Dr. Ronald Turgeon, who had performed the autopsy on Sean, testified on the second day. Questioned by Goldman, he stated that the first shot, which powder residue and searing on the flesh showed had been fired from a distance of within an inch or less but not in actual contact, had entered at the back of the head just to the right of center, had traveled upward at an angle through the brain, and had exited at the corner of the left eye. Blood and flesh fragments found on the left shoulder and in the crook of the left arm showed that the victim had been standing, with his left arm slightly raised, as the first shot was fired. There was no way for blood to have splattered in that particular pattern on the left shoulder and arm if the victim had been lying down.

The second shot, Dr. Turgeon said, had been fired from a distance of twelve to eighteen inches when the victim was on the ground. It had entered near the right ear and had not exited, lodging in the brain. Either shot had been lethal. The victim had been brain-dead when the second shot was fired.

Margulis did his best to refute Turgeon and brought on a medical expert to argue that the ballistics evidence was inconclusive. The key question was whether Sean had fired the first shot into the side of his head. If Dr. Turgeon was correct in saying that the shot to the back of the head had been fired first, as the blood on the left shoulder and arm seemed to confirm, for Sean to have inflicted this wound on himself was, if not impossible, nearly so, and an act inconsistent with suicide.

When Kevin, Charli and Marian testified, they had to face Dale, who fixed them with a steady, hostile gaze, and a courtroom packed with his supporters from southern Illinois. The Cavanesses recognized most of the faces and knew that these people regarded the family as a trio of Judases. But Charli, whom Goldman chose to testify first because she seemed to be in better emotional shape than Kevin or Marian, came through strongly, accounting for Dale’s behavior during the days following Sean’s death. She managed to slip in her story about finding gas escaping from all four burners on the stove at the Galatia trailer. Margulis, who had not heard this anecdote before and was caught off guard by it, was unable to stop her.

Charli gave a coherent, articulate picture of Dale as an uncaring father who showed no concern for his troubled son and who at first had been unwilling to pay for his funeral expenses. Charli was six months pregnant at the time of her testimony, and Steve Goldman hoped that her condition would add to her credibility as a devoted relative of the victim.

Kevin heartened Goldman by his dignity and precision of description. He came across as angered and tortured by his ordeal; he spoke of how his father had resented paying for the funeral and how Dale had acted at the service, behaving like the host at a wedding reception. Kevin conveyed his understanding of his father’s financial problems and revealed how the doctor had lied about whether the insurance on Sean’s life was paid up and in effect.

Kevin’s testimony, together with Goldman’s documented evidence showing that Dale had declared a two-hundred-thousand-dollar negative net income on his 1983 income tax, added to other indications of a man in financial trouble despite the large income from his medical practice.

Marian, whom Goldman cautioned beforehand not to mention Mark’s death—it was irrelevant to this trial and would trigger a motion for a mistrial if introduced—described how Dale had told her, when she had been six months pregnant with Patrick, that he did not love her or want her or need her. She recalled Dale’s hostile behavior toward Sean at Christmas in St. Louis in 1982, saying that he had chased Sean down the block and shouted, “I’ll kill him. I don’t care if I go to prison. I’ll kill him.” She said that Dale had been unresponsive when she had called him to inform him of Sean’s death and that he became surly and hung up on her before she could finish talking to him. She described Dale as loud and abusive toward his family.

“His patients loved him, apparently,” Marian said, “but he didn’t have any use for us.”

Marian found testifying against Dale traumatic. She could feel Dale’s eyes boring into her—especially when she stated her name as Marian Green, as if he still refused to accept that she was no longer his wife. She was sure now that he had deliberately contrived to delay their divorce decree, to exercise a last power over her.

Steve Goldman was optimistic about a conviction. The family had performed admirably; the financial evidence showed Dale in debt for at least half a million dollars, with assets of about a hundred and fifty thousand and creditors hounding him; and the ballistics evidence weighed strongly against the doctor’s bizarre version of events. It remained for Dr. Cavaness to take the stand and testify in his own defense. Goldman hoped that the jury would see him as a cold-blooded villain. To Goldman, who had two children of his own, the doctor was the most sinister defendant he had ever prosecuted.

Saturday, July 13, was the worst day of Steve Goldman’s professional life. The jury was examining evidence—Sean’s clothing, the murder weapon, the eloquent contents of the doctor’s briefcase left behind at Kevin’s apartment—when suddenly Goldman realized that one of his assistants had mistakenly included Sam Yarbrough’s report of the results of the lie-detector test. Polygraph evidence was inadmissible in Missouri: The machine was not considered sufficiently reliable. The introduction of polygraph evidence was sure grounds for a mistrial.

Goldman took the bad news to the chief county prosecutor, Buzz Westfall, who agreed that they had an ethical obligation to report this lamentable mistake to Art Margulis. The polygraph results, which showed that Dale had failed the examination and lied repeatedly to Yarbrough, were certainly prejudicial to the defendant.

Goldman contacted Margulis, who expressed his appreciation for Goldman’s honesty and said that he would recommend to his client that they move for a mistrial.

“I’m sure he’ll agree,” Margulis said. “I’ll explain to him that a second trial usually works to the advantage of the defendant.”