The end of the night (21 page)

Long days of testimony, of exhibits, objections, cross examinations tend to focus the mind and the attention on trivia, so that the larger issues are forgotten. John Quain is a clever, dogged, tireless prosecutor. I cannot take the chance of giving him perfectly free rein to establish the State's case. I must protect my clients through emphasizing the chance of reasonable doubt in certain areas, in spite of my master plan of defense which borrows from certain interesting aspects'of the Loeb-Leopold Case.

John Quain is perfectly aware of my obligation to weaken, insofar as is possible, his edifice of evidence, and thus I must be constantly alert to avoid the traps implicit in his presentation. This, despite the competent staff at my elbow, is an exhausting task.

I believe that I dug a few important holes in the testimony of the youngsters, Howard Craft and Ruth Meckler. The most significant one was Howard's admission that it is possible that Arnold Crown struck the first blow, and due to their angle of observation, they missed it.

Murder in the first degree implies motive, opportunity and prior intent. The priority of intent need be only a matter of a split second. If a murderer had adequate reason to have a rock in his hand, premeditation would be difficult to establish. But should he seek a rock and bend and pick it up, premeditation exists during that interval. However, should he be struck or injured in any way before picking up the rock, the chance of proving premeditation is weakened thereby.

Would that I were pennitted to defend these people before a judge and jury and spectators who had never heard of their wicked exploits. Justice, in the circumstances I face, is a farce. A whole nation watches these four human beings. An outraged nation demands they be executed. You can feel the weight of all the pressure in that courtroom. It is a tangible heaviness. If Stassen, Golden, Hernandez and Koslov had come from the most remote planet of the galaxy, if they were creatures of slime and tentacles, they could not be watched with any more curiosity and revulsion.

They are being tried for what was done to the salesman, to the Nashville people, to Arnold Crown and to Helen Wister, not just for Crown alone. So this case is only symbohc, and hence my defense is the only possible one.

It is interesting to see the various ways the four of them accept their long hours on trial. Stassen, in his well-cut flannel suit, with his polite, attentive and somewhat detached manner, would look much more at home at the press table. He writes me short notes from time to time. Some of them have been mildly helpful. I have noticed that he often stares directly at his jurors. I sense that he seems to baffle them, that they cannot equate his demeanor with the evidence presented.

The idleness, the enforced spectator role is most difficult for Sander Golden to endure. He jitters and twitches endlessly, keeping a dozen mannerisms going at the same time. He whispers and mutters to the other defendants until he has to be silenced a half dozen times a day. He stares with bright mockery at every member of the jury in turn until they look away. He has written me foolish notes in an awkward hand, miserably spelled.

The girl sits placidly. She plays with her hair. She nibbles her nails. She yawns, and often, out of boredom, sighs audibly, recrosses her legs, scratches her thigh, yawns again. She cannot understand why she cannot have magazines to look at. Sometimes she draws the same face over and over again, the empty comic-book face of a pretty girl.

Robert Hernandez endures it with the silent, unmoving patience of an ox. His metabolism is low, his deep, slow breathing imperceptible. A bear in a cage, when it is not pacing, will endure in that same way. He stares at the floor fifteen feet in front of him. A hairy fist lies slack on the table. The jury regards him with more assurance. This is a criminal type. Can't you see it?

I have tried to analyze the tangible emanations of hate that come from the spectators. It is uncommon, even in murder trials. I believe I have the reason for it. They did not kill for profit. Their entire adventure netted them less than fifteen hundred dollars, and finding so much cash on Crown was an accident they could not have anticipated.

So because it was violence without meaning, they made a small, cheap thing of life. It is the instinct of man to consider life of greatest importance. If it is to be taken away the reason should be substantial. So he who denigrates the value of life, tries to give it a lower value in the market place, must be punished for the commission of great evil

And they have made a small, cheap thing of love. That is the second unforgivable. Reckless lust, if it should shake a man and overwhelm him and make him commit idiocies, can be partially understood and thus forgiven. But a casual code which makes of the act of sex a function barely more important than shaking hands invites hate and pum'shment.

By diminishing life and diminishing love, they have threatened to diminish every man and woman who learned of their acts. When anyone seeks to reduce you, in your own eyes, to unimportance, you fight.

So these hated four sit in a court and famous artists draw them for the big magazines. A journalist coins the name Handy Nan, and ten thousand dirty jokes are invented. A hundred thousand fathers give their wayward teen-age daughters overdue whippings, and a predictable number of them leave home as a result. Car thefts have increased greatly. There is a higher than normal incidence of rape. A few people have been kicked to death by vicious metropolitan youngsters.

And all of this, too, is a part of the circus in the courtroom. What we do each day affects a number of lives impossible to compute.

As the man who must defend them, I have made a special effort to avoid emotional prejudice toward these four distorted people. But in all honesty I must confess to a distaste which has been caused by the way they have cheapened the illusions man holds most dear.

They have made me feel less safe in the world. Deep in my heart is the wish they may come to great harm. But I cannot permit that emotion to affect the professional competence I am contributing to their defense.

These four I defend do not concern themselves with the

slightest romantic rationalization in their personal relationships. And so their only differentiation from beasts of the field is that they stand on two legs rather than four. One hundred years ago animals were still being tried for murder, condenmed and executed.

I have discovered no exercise of logic which can soften my distaste for these defendants. That is one handicap I face. The second handicap is the lucidit>' apd shrewdness of the prosecutor, John Quain. The third crucial factor is the impression these people make upon the jury—a thing now out of my control. Lastly, there is the philosophy of my defense. I keep stressing, at every opportunity, the accidental pattern of this whole thing.

In my summation I shall use an analogy which I hope will not be too crude. It should be effective. I have dismantled my hedge clippers and I shall take them into court Two blades, two handles. One blade will represent the girl, the other one Hernandez. One handle will represent Stassen, the other Golden, t will assemble it before the jury and show them that any three parts, assembled together, can do no damage. It is only when the four parts are brought together that you have an instrument which can clip a hedge, or a throat. So does it make sense to take the four parts, now disassembled and hence of no danger, and destroy those parts separately? The thing responsible for the crime was these four, acting as a new entity, doing things which any three of them would not and could not have done. So is not society satisfied merely to make certain that these four pieces can never again be assembled into an instrument of destruction? If hedge clippers should destroy a beautiful shrub, can you blame one handle? Or one blade?

If I have any pride at all in this situation it is in my earnest desire not to try to use this case, as many men would, to further my own career. I was selected for it only because they happened to take a highway through this area, because they happened along when a lovely girl lay helpless on the road, and because two young lovers watched a murder take place. It was a web of accident.

My duty is to fight for life imprisonment for these people, for a verdict of guilty with a recommendation of mercy. That is the ultimate I can hope to attain. Had I cared to use this public exposure, indeed this national exposure, for my own purposes, I would have selected a hne of defense with less

chance of succeeding, but offering more range for me to display my competence at this sort of work.

It would help me in times such as these if I had one human being very close to me to whom I could talk with the utmost frankness, to whom I could reveal my hopes and fears, my joys and my sorrows. I cannot speak to my wife of such things. She has no training in, no knowledge of, and no curiosity about the law. I cannot talk fully and deeply to my associates in the office. This would have to be a special relationship, resolutely intimate, close and unafraid. Perhaps all troubled, lonely men have yearned for this difficult goal, and perhaps have had the good fortune to attain it.

I suspect that Dr. Paul Wister is one of those. In his hour of blackness I saw in him that kind of strength that cannot b« maintained and sustained in the ways of loneliness.

I doubt that I could endure the blow that fell upon him. ...

ELEVEN

By mid-afternoon on Monday the twenty-seventh, Herbert Dunnigan made the executive decision to pull his special group out of Monroe. All investigative possiblities had been exhausted. It was a valid assumption that the wanted ones had slipped through the net. He left one agent for administrative co-ordination and, after dismantling the emergency communications network, emplaned for Washington with the rest of his group. The death watch could be endured with more efficiency there, and the press kept under better control.

The important journalists and the roving tape crews and the few radio people also moved out on Monday. Monroe had lost its priority. After the wolf is long gone, the nervous flock can begin to feed again.

Both Dallas Kemp and the Wister family took this mass departure to mean the abandonment of hope for the life of Helen Wister. There had been a meager comfort in the presence of top authority—in much the same way that troops on a hopeless front will cherish the presence of the commander

of an army. When he leaves they once again remember how easily they can be overwhelmed.

By three o'clock on Monday afternoon, Helen Wister had been captive over forty hours. Criminologically speaking, the prognosis was bad.

The departure of top authority left a hole. Sheriff Gus Kurby had an instinct about such things. There were times to keep your head down. There were other times when you could safely stomp and bellow. But you had to come up with something usable.

He sat in his big comer office on the second floor of the County Courthouse, in his big red leather swivel chair, his hat shoved back, his belt comfortably loosened over a late and heavy lunch. The day had turned humid. There was distant thunder, and a brassy quality to the afternoon sunlight.

On the pale-gray walls of his office were the framed evidences of many small triumphs. On the desk, mounted on a cherrywood base and a slender silver pedestal was the misshapen slug, .38 caliber, which, in 1949, had punched a raw hole under his collarbone, nicked the top of his right lung and cracked the shoulder blade and won an election. With the slug in him Gus had disarmed his assailant with such emphasis that he had snapped both the man's wrists.

Gus Kurby sighed mightily as he watched his favorite deputy, Roily Spring, working on the map. Roily was a spare little man, a crickety fellow with seven kids, a genius for loyalty, a sour outlook, and the single flaw of being entirely too quick and willing to put random patterns of hard knots on surly heads with his hickory nightstick.

The map was new and large. It was a map of the United States and it covered most of the big bulletin board. It was printed in black and white, so the track of red crayon being applied by Deputy Spring stood out vividly.

The work was also being watched by a local newspaperman named Mason Ives. Mase was, occupationally speaking, a displaced person. He was in the classic mold of the old-time reporter, lean, rumpled, bitter, iconoclastic, skeptical, imaginative and compulsively curious. Any alert producer would have cast him immediately as the reporter who beat the mob. But the reporting was all being done by wholesome tractable journalism graduates who drew Guild wages, kept regular hours and did exactly as they were told. And so Mase was relegated to doing an op. ed. colunm for the Monroe Register,

rather weakly syndicated around the state, plus sporadic feature-story work. He had learned to so mask his corrosive irony that it delighted the bright reader without awakening the indignation of the dullard majority.

Mase Ives was the only newspaperman Gus Kurby trusted implicitly. Mase was the only man who had an understanding of what Gus was accomplishing, and Gus's way of accomplishing it. Mase, with tactical advice and some speech writing, had helped Gus win elections.

"You got to realize," Gus said, "I'm just a plain shurf."

"Sure, sure, sure," Mase said. He was sitting on a small table beside one of the large windows. "A plain little ole country sheriff, trying to get along. A simple graduate of the top police schools, with one of the biggest libraries on criminology in the state. Tell me more, simple man."

"Hell, Mase. Some very bright people are doing this same job of studying this thing out, maps and all."

"And any ideas they get, they got to go through channels and committees. They're big for staff work, Gus."

Gus sighed again. Spring had finished and checked his work. "I got me a couple of ideas. I could check 'em out with you, Mase."

"I'll listen and try to confuse you."

Gus got up and latched his belt and went over to the map. Roily Spring had drawn a red line, following specific highways, from Uvalde to Monroe.

Gus studied it in silence for a few moments. "I'm just guessing, now. There's a make on one of them. Hernandez. From the record, he's got just enough upstairs so he can feed himself. And he isn't what you'd call a playful type. Those kids in the bam heard all that smart talk, that wise-guy talk from the one with glasses. He's bright. So let's say he's running things. And he's playful. He does things on impulse. He was driving when they stopped to kill Crown and take the Wister girl. There's something pla3^ul about killing the salesman, like they toyed around with him some. I say they're using drugs. It smells that way. But not something to make them crazy enough and reckless enough to get caught easy. Okay so far?"