Murder in Little Egypt (45 page)

Reverend Langham retreated. He hurried out to join Bertis Herrmann and the other downcast, indignant supporters of the doc.

Whatever his opinion of the defense attorney, the Reverend Staley Langham was among eight character witnesses, including Bertis Herrmann and Emma Lou Mitchell, whom Margulis called to testify the next morning on Dr. Cavaness’s behalf. Margulis’s strategy was that the simple faith of these southern-Illinois people in their doctor, whose good deeds over the years they would recall, would be enough to persuade the jury to spare Dale’s life. Like most people, Margulis assumed that Reverend Langham was an old friend of the doctor’s. Why else would he have spent so much time defending him and helping to raise money for him, visiting him in prison, portraying him sympathetically to the press?

But when Margulis told Reverend Langham that he would at last have the opportunity to take the stand and to tell the jury about his long-term, intimate friendship with Dr. Cavaness, Langham, hanging his head, said that he was afraid that he could not do that. He had never known Dr. Cavaness well at all until he had gone to visit him in his jail cell after his arrest. He had merely known of him, who he was, but not to speak to him. He had seen the doctor at Pearce Hospital, of course, where like any minister he visited sick members of his congregation. It was more a matter of being familiar with the doctor’s reputation, rather than a personal friendship.

“Oh, well,” Margulis sighed, “we’ll have to go with that, I guess.”

The minister was the final character witness called by the defense. Reverend Langham, putting the best face on things without perjuring himself, said that he had lived in Eldorado for seven and a half years and that he had known Dr. Cavaness “just about that long, as far as the relationship at the hospital where he practiced.” He said that he often visited the hospital and that Dr. Cavaness’s reputation with his patients was “tremendous.”

Goldman asked Langham whether he had heard that Dr. Cavaness had pushed another doctor out of a boat, had brought a gun to a physicians’ meeting, was convicted of the reckless homicide of Donald McLaskey and his infant child, was convicted of medical fraud, and had been implicated in the selling of liquid morphine and Demerol to a convicted felon named Johnny Weingarten. To all of these Reverend Langham answered no, and that hearing about them now did not in one bit alter his high regard for Dr. Cavaness.

“Being a minister,” Langham said, “I never accept gossip or hearsay, so from the evidence that I have, I love Dr. Cavaness as much right now as I did before you said these things.”

When Steve Goldman called as the State’s only witness during the penalty phase the defendant’s son, Kevin Cavaness, Art Margulis feared the worst for his client. It was unprecedented in Margulis’s more than twenty years’ experience as a defense attorney to have a defendant’s child perform such a role in the penalty phase of a trial. Margulis believed that the impact on the jury might prove fatal to Dr. Cavaness. Margulis had lost many cases and won many; he had never had a client sentenced to death.

All morning before taking the stand, Kevin had been on the verge of backing out and relinquishing this awful task, but the pictures he had seen of Sean’s body, his bullet-torn head, his blood-soaked shirt—the thought that Dale had left him like Mark to rot or be savaged—kept coming into Kevin’s mind. Finally he decided that for Mark’s and Sean’s sakes he had to go through with testifying again. His brothers would be standing with him in the witness box. He was their chance for redemption and for justice. His mother and his wife would be sitting there just behind the press, in the third row, plainly in his view. He could look at Marian and Charli and gain courage when he felt his father staring at him with murderous hatred in those hooded eyes.

Over Margulis’s objections, Kevin, questioned by Goldman, said that Johnny Weingarten was the one-time son-in-law of Dr. Cavaness’s girlfriend, Martha Culley. When he had asked his father about the arrest of Johnny Weingarten, Kevin said, Dale had threatened to kill him if he told anyone. Kevin then recounted Dale’s story about the drugs in the safe.

“Whom did he say that he would kill when he was telling you this?” Goldman asked.

“Both Charli and me,” Kevin said.

“What was your reaction to that?”

“At first,” Kevin said, “I was kind of shocked, and then I thought, he doesn’t really mean ‘to kill.’ But the way he said it, after I got to thinking about it, I do believe he meant it.”

Margulis tried to soften this devastating testimony, which settled over the courtroom like a shroud.

“Kevin,” Margulis said, “in your experience, isn’t when you say something about ‘I will kill you’ a rather common expression of speech?”

“Not the way he expressed it,” Kevin said.

“You said yourself that you concluded he probably didn’t mean it, didn’t you?”

“Well, I would like to hope he didn’t.”

There remained only the closing arguments by the defense and prosecution. Margulis emphasized the doctor’s age and the fact that, in Missouri, there was no possibility of parole for a convicted capital murderer. That the doctor had undoubtedly served humanity in the past and saved many lives ought to weigh in the jury’s decision, Margulis said:

“Clearly Dr. Cavaness is a valuable and a useful human being. There are a lot of services yet to be rendered.”

Steve Goldman was relentless. Dr. Cavaness had forfeited his right to be treated like a normal human being. The jury was not being asked to play God. The doctor played God when he took the life of his son. Only God could sit in moral judgment. The jury was sitting only in legal judgment:

“This case cries out for the death penalty. Marian and Sean and Kevin deserve justice here. If people do not receive justice for a crime like this, they will seek it themselves in the streets.”

Goldman asked the jurors to think about their own children and to place themselves in Marian’s and in Kevin’s position. The jury had done a fine and a courageous job so far, but they still had a job to complete. They should think of themselves as the representatives and the protectors of their fellow citizens in a state where the courts are friends of humanity:

“Your job is to raise once more the great protection that we have of the law, in St. Louis County, in Jackson County and everywhere in Missouri, where men and women and children seek to live safely and peacefully.

“Thank you.”

The jury retired to their deliberations at eleven-thirty Wednesday morning. They returned after lunch with a verdict of death.

Dale tightned his lips but showed no other reaction. Marian bent over in her seat and cried; Kevin and Charli comforted her. They then made their way out of the courtroom, assailed by reporters’ questions. Marian said that she was shocked by the death sentence for her ex-husband.

“I did love him once,” she said. “I didn’t expect this. It would have been enough to have him safely put away.”

Kevin told the press that he would not wish death on anyone, but he was sure that his father felt no remorse for killing Sean. He had been suspicious, Kevin said, ever since Mark’s death. He accepted the jury’s decision, believing that they had done what was right:

“If I could be sure that he’d be safely locked up, that would be one thing. But as long as he’s alive, I can’t feel safe for myself or my family.”

In the crowded corridor Art Margulis made his way through the reporters and came up to Kevin, looking him in the eye, extending his hand. Kevin took the lawyer’s hand and wondered what this was all about. Margulis was not the person he expected to see after the trial. He did not feel hatred for the lawyer, but he hardly considered him a friend of the family.

“I hope things will be better for you from now on,” Margulis said, and left.

Kevin, moved, was speechless, until he had to respond to more reporters’ questions.

“I feel sad for him,” Kevin said. “He is my father, whether I like it or not.”

Asked if he thought his father was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kevin replied, “Yes, he was.” Standing nearby with Jack Nolen and overhearing this exchange, Dave Barron commented that he thought Dr. Cavaness was Mr. Hyde all the way. Nolen agreed.

Both Kevin and Charli expressed to the reporters their disappointment and frustration at all the support Dale had received from the citizens of Eldorado.

“What bothers me,” Charli said, “about the reaction of these people is that I grew up in Eldorado, I went to school in Eldorado with some of these people’s children, and I worked in Eldorado at Pearce Hospital. I wonder, do people have blinders on? I heard one person say here today that no matter what someone told her about Dale it would not lower her opinion of him. What kind of reasoning is that?”

Dale’s supporters assured the press that their loyalty remained firm. Martha Culley, who had made her first appearance in the courtroom that day because, she said, her high blood pressure prevented her from attending the entire trial, stated that Dale was “absolutely not” guilty of killing his son. She would visit him in prison as often as she could. Another woman, who had been Dr. Cavaness’s patient for twenty years and who had written a letter to southern-Illinois papers denouncing the St. Louis police, revealed perhaps more than she knew by saying that “watching this trial was like watching a school play.”

As Marian, Kevin and Charli were getting into their car, a woman who appeared to be in her sixties came up to them. She wanted to wish them well, she said, and to congratulate them on their courage and endurance. She was sure that justice had been done. She had gone to high school with Dale Cavaness, and she had always known that he was a bad person.

“Why is that?” Marian asked.

“Because once in high school my parents gave me a new watch, and Dale Cavaness asked to see it and he dropped it on the ground and stepped on it and crushed it.”

The woman turned away and vanished before Marian had a chance to get her name.

26

IT WAS WITHIN JUDGE DREW LUTEN’S AUTHORITY TO OVERRULE the jury’s recommendation of the death penalty and to lessen the sentence to life without parole. Art Margulis asked at the time of formal sentencing, on January 6, 1985, that the judge “show some mercy and some leniency in determining what sentence to impose.”

Judge Luten saw no reason not to accept the jury’s recommendation and uttered the fatal words:

“Therefore it is ordered and adjudged by the Court that said defendant, John D. Cavaness, be and is hereby sentenced to death, for the offense, murder first degree, a Class A felony; said sentence to be carried out at a time to be set by the Supreme Court of this State.

“Defendant is remanded to the custody of the Department of Justice Services of St. Louis County, Missouri, to be delivered by the Department of Justice to the warden of the State Penitentiary at Jefferson City on or before the 16th day of January, 1986, and there within the walls of the State Penitentiary, under the direction of said warden, he shall suffer death by the administration of lethal gas at a time to be set by the Supreme Court of this State, and said warden is directed to make return on this warrant to this Court showing the time, mode and manner in which this warrant was executed.”

Appeal of a death sentence was automatic in Missouri as in all the other states. Art Margulis at this point withdrew from the case. The defense fund was exhausted, and Dale’s supporters were publicly denouncing the defense attorney, accusing him of botching the job. Reverend Langham wrote to the judge and to other legal officials in St. Louis demanding a new trial, saying that he had explained new evidence to the defense attorney and could not understand “why Mr. Margulis abandoned his client.” Langham signed his letters “Prayerfully yours.”

At least one resident of Little Egypt, however, made a courageous attempt to heal a wounded, divided community. Erin Brothers was a young reporter for the Harrisburg
Daily Register
who was assigned to what was rather grandly called the “Eldorado Bureau” and who had personally covered the trial in St. Louis. In an editorial printed in large type, she confessed that, not having grown up in Eldorado, she did not know Dr. Cavaness and had never met him. (Dale had refused to give her an interview.) But the trial, she said, had left an indelible mark on her, as she was sure it had on the jury.

She praised Arthur Margulis for carrying out his difficult task. Both he and Steve Goldman “did unbelievable jobs of representing their sides, but Goldman’s evidence prevailed.” Given the evidence, Brothers said, the jury had made the right choice in convicting Dr. Cavaness; she was less sure about the death penalty.

Brothers offered understanding to the doctor’s supporters. No man, she said, deserves to be entirely alone during his worst days. Justice had been done, but it was a sad day for everyone in the community, not a cause for rejoicing. As Kevin Cavaness had said, “He’s still my father.”

Brothers’s article, a small masterpiece of tact, did much to enable people on opposite sides of the Cavaness fence to speak to one another again, especially in Harrisburg; in Eldorado, residents who would voice an opinion estimated that at least half the population still supported Dr. Cavaness. Jack Nolen put the number at more than half. He knew some of the supporters personally and liked many of them; they just had this fixation on the doc. It was almost like a religious cult.

Pursuing Dale’s appeal fell to Beth Dockery, a young lawyer in the Office of the Public Defender in St. Louis who, in examining the trial transcript, admitted privately that no errors appeared to have been made by either the judge or the attorneys, who seemed to have done an admirable job with a difficult, emotion-fraught case. She was preparing her brief, however, when in April 1985, she received a telephone call from a man who identified himself as Howard Eisenberg, professor of law and director of the Legal Clinic at Southern Illinois University. Professor Eisenberg stated that he had been chief public defender for the state of Wisconsin from 1971 to 1978 and executive director of the National Legal Aid and Public Defenders Association in Washington, D.C., from 1978 to 1983, before assuming his position at S.I.U.