To Hatred Turned (28 page)

Chapman promised that the prosecution also would introduce tangible physical evidence proving that Andy had told Morris McGowan, now a lieutenant, the truth when he admitted to the attack. That evidence would consist primarily of the pistol Andy said he had used, a weapon that ballistics experts would testify had been the one that fired the bullets into Rozanne’s head.

The ADA left it to the jurors to make the connections: Andy admitted taking money for the crime…he admitted the attack…he led police to the pistol he said he used…scientific tests would show that the pistol was the one that fired the shots…ergo, Andy was the killer.

The impression the prosecutor left with the members of the jury was that it was a pat case, one that was all wrapped up and needed only their verdict to make it official.

But when the defense got its turn, Lesser threw an unexpected curveball at the prosecution. The scenario he presented had tremendous potential for derailing the district attorney’s expected express.

As Chapman settled back into his chair, Lesser strolled casually to the front of the room and stopped in front of the judge’s platform. It was Lesser’s normal strategy not to make an opening statement. Why, he reasoned, should he tip off the prosecution to the case he was about to make. In this instance, however, he made an exception. Exactly what made him take that tack was a puzzle, since he did not know until he stood up that he was going to do it. In retrospect, he felt that the opening statement he made was his first mistake of the trial.

Nonchalantly sticking his hands in the pockets of his dark suit, Lesser affected a relaxed pose. In the next few days, he began in a controversial tone, he and Mitchell would share with jurors what radio newscaster Paul Harvey called “the rest of the story.”

While not contradicting Chapman’s contention that Andy was in Rozanne’s house, Lesser said he would show jurors that the tale was much more convoluted than the prosecution had led them to believe. For one thing, he said, he would attempt to tie Rozanne’s estranged husband, Dr. Peter Gailiunas, Jr., to her death. Furthermore, the defense attorney added, the incident did not begin on October 4, 1983, the day Rozanne was attacked, but had its roots in a series of events set in motion weeks previously by Joy Aylor, whose estranged husband was having an affair with Rozanne. This affair, he said, was the reason for Rozanne’s murder.

Aware that he was treading on dangerous ground—that the prosecutor and Judge McDowell would strenuously resist his efforts to drag Joy into Andy’s trial to any substantial degree—he deftly switched gears and swung the focus back to Peter Gailiunas.

“Testimony will show,” he said almost matter of factly, “that Rozanne’s four-year-old son claimed that ‘Daddy’ was there before
and
after ‘Mommy’ got sick.” Additional testimony would show, he continued, that Joy’s former husband, Larry, called for Rozanne that afternoon, but the phone was answered by the boy. “Larry will say that he heard in the background someone yell, ‘Put the phone down, goddamnit.’ Larry Aylor will say the voice was that of Dr. Gailiunas.”

But Lesser was saving his big news for last. In addition, he said, he planned to introduce medical records from Presbyterian Hospital showing that the drug Thorazine was present in Rozanne’s system when she was admitted. What the defense was going to try to show, Lesser was saying, was that even if Andy had tied, strangled, and shot Rozanne, he may not have killed her: The weapon that pushed her over the edge may have been a mystery drug that the pathologist who performed the autopsy had not found because she never obtained blood to test. “The presence of this drug was totally missed by the medical examiner’s office,” he said heatedly, abandoning his over-the-back-fence tone. Even more ominously, he added, was the fact that the discovery continued to be ignored. Thorazine was not a commonly used drug, he continued, although it would be readily available to Gailiunas, a kidney specialist, because it was frequently used in the treatment of people required to undergo dialysis.

Delving into the subject just enough to pique the jurors’ curiosity, Lesser said he planned to elicit testimony showing that Gailiunas was at one time a suspect in his estranged wife’s murder, that he did not have a verifiable alibi for two crucial hours on the afternoon that Rozanne was attacked, and that he had at one time allegedly threatened her with a shotgun.

What Lesser was telling the jury was that the prosecution might think it had a tight case within certain narrow boundaries, but he intended to open up the possibilities and show more than one side.

It was vintage Lesser, a brazen attempt that could, at the very least, create among jurors a reasonable doubt about the involvement of someone other than, or in addition to, his client. He was deliberately vague on some points, such as the thread, if any, between Joy and Dr. Gailiunas, or between Larry and the physician. Just how Andy fit into the defense scenario also was unclear. Lesser was particularly obscure on that point, saying only that he intended to challenge the statements his client made to investigators, hinting that he would try to show that Andy was trapped into making the admissions through a clever scheme by prosecutors and investigators to keep Andy’s lawyer—at that time Jan Hemphill—from knowing exactly what was going down at the Richardson Police Department.

With a verbal wink and the tantalizing lure of startling revelations to come, Lesser sauntered back to his chair. It took him twenty minutes to present the bare outline of the defense’s case; he implied it would take several weeks to round out the argument.

Later, when he had time to reconsider his words, Lesser regretted mentioning the Thorazine to the jury in the opening statement. Although the prosecution was aware of the report attesting to the drug’s presence, Chapman and Hagood apparently had attached no special significance to it, although Lesser did not know that at the time. By mentioning it before testimony started, he had done what he most wanted to avoid: He had tipped off the prosecution in plenty of time for Hagood and Chapman to try to devise a plausible explanation to counter his and Mitchell’s argument of why the drug was in Rozanne’s body. Even worse, Lesser felt he had overestimated the prosecution’s capacity for preparing for all eventualities. It was a mistake, he felt, that the defense would pay for dearly.

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In line with what could be expected from the district attorney’s office, the case built by Chapman over the next few days was workmanlike, incriminating but hardly flashy. That was no reflection on Chapman; it was simply the way the office worked, and it had worked that way long before Chapman signed on.

Over the years in the last third of this century, the reigning district attorneys, first Henry Wade and then John Vance, built a reputation for thoroughness and persistence, not flamboyance. The office philosophy was a model of conservatism: ADAs wore dark suits, white shirts, conservative ties, highly polished shoes or, in a nod to the local culture, western boots, as long as they were not the ostentatious type favored by dancehall cowboys. The head hair was to be short, preferably army style. Beards were verboten. When it came time to present the case in court, ADAs followed the same orthodox plan: Tender the facts as they saw them as unsensationally and as narrowly as possible, then keep pounding away at those premises relentlessly, inflexibly, and unswervingly. Be hard-nosed…be merciless…and be unyielding. Leave the show-boating to defense attorneys like Lesser and Mitchell. Borrowing the Boy Scouts’ motto, the DA’s creed demanded that prosecutors, above all, be prepared.

Chapman fit this mold perfectly. A low-key litigator who rarely raised his voice, Chapman was known as a perfectionist and an obsessive preparer, a tireless worker who firmly believed that the key to courtroom success was groundwork rather than histrionics, that organization was more crucial than dramatics. This philosophy was readily apparent to even the most casual courtroom observer. At the beginning of proceedings each day the prosecution team wheeled in a bright red dolly sturdy enough to support a refrigerator. Stacked one atop the other on the dolly’s platform were some two dozen black looseleaf binders, each at least three inches thick. Those were Chapman’s trial notes.

Running as smoothly as a finely tuned engine, Chapman began building his case, calling a series of witnesses to set the scene for Rozanne’s murder: the dead woman’s father, a couple of glass-company employees who replaced the broken windowpane on her house, a locksmith who changed her locks, young Peter’s day-care teacher, his skating instructor, a neighbor, and the paramedic Winfred Duggan.

Ironically, given the publicity the case had received over the months and years before Andy’s trial, the drama was playing to a virtually empty house. Except for a few courthouse employees and a journalism class from Southern Methodist University that visited sporadically, the only regular spectators were members of Rozanne’s family, Dr. Peter Gailiunas’s mother, and, invariably, Andy’s parents. Rozanne’s family members remained stoic throughout the vivid testimony in which Rozanne’s last hours were detailed, staring straight at the wall behind Judge McDowell or at their feet. Andy’s parents, his father clad in work clothes and his mother in a neat, carefully pressed dress, sat immediately behind their son on the hard wooden bench. When the testimony got too graphic, Andy’s mother buried her head in an inspirational book or a religious tract, while his father seemed not to hear.

Gradually, as the trial dragged on, the prosecution’s game plan swung into focus. Chapman had begun at the bottom of the list, and as he moved upward through the preliminary witnesses, the pertinency of the testimony grew. His aim was to build a seamless box around Andy. But, contrary to his plan, as the trial drew on, the box became increasingly less airtight.

One of the weaknesses of the prosecution case developed on the fourth day when Chapman called Dr. M. G. F. Gilliland, the pathologist who had performed the autopsy on Rozanne.

Gilliland mesmerized the jury with projected color slides of portions of Rozanne’s body magnified to many times life-size. The marks on her neck, projected on the screen, were as large as a weightlifter’s arms. Her face was the size of a beachball, magnified so jurors could clearly discern the tiny blemishes caused by popped blood vessels. And the two ugly bullet wounds in her head grew as large as baseballs. Definitely, Gilliland said in a tone that bordered on the supercilious, it was those wounds, combined with strangulation, that had caused Rozanne’s death.

Seeking to defuse the defense’s tip about Thorazine, Chapman asked Gilliland if, given the severity of Rozanne’s wounds, the drug would have made any difference in her potential for survival. The pathologist puckered her thin lips and pondered the question for several seconds before responding with a crisp, unequivocal “No!”

Archly, she added: “Thorazine was not the cause of death or even a contributing cause,” ignoring the fact that from a legal point of view the point was immaterial. If the drug was administered with the
intention
of killing Rozanne or hastening her death, that person would be just as culpable as the person who shot and strangled her even if the drug had not killed her.

When Mitchell got his shot at Gilliland during cross-examination, he pointed to the footnote in her report that read “No antemortem blood available.” The defense attorney challenged her thoroughness, claiming that blood was indeed available because a sample had been drawn from Rozanne when she was admitted to the hospital. He accused Gilliland of negligence in not tracking down that information when it could have been vital in determining the cause of death.

To the defense, the Thorazine was an important, if not crucial, issue. A powerful drug used primarily in mental hospitals to control violent psychotics (it induces a zombielike state referred to among medical people as “the Thorazine shuffle”), its presence in Rozanne’s body was sinister, a mystery that threw into doubt the prosecution claim that her death resulted solely from Andy’s brutal attack. It was a point that the defense team would come back to repeatedly throughout the trial, but what Mitchell wanted to do with Gilliland was force her to admit that the drug may have been a contributing factor. She refused to cooperate.

Calling on her personal experience as a psychiatrist, a specialty she practiced briefly before switching to pathology, Gilliland speculated that Rozanne, a registered nurse, could have had access to Thorazine and may have medicated herself to help relieve depression or anxiety over her stormy marital situation.

Mitchell scoffed at that idea. Thorazine, he pointed out, was not a “happy” drug. It was not a medication people took voluntarily in an attempt to raise their spirits. It was, he said, a system depressant with decidedly unpleasant side effects.

Gilliland, seeing where Mitchell was going, waved off his allegations. The amount of the drug that Rozanne may have had in her body originally, perhaps 150 milligrams, was, according to the pathologist, within the therapeutic range.

Mitchell disputed that point of view, citing medical reference texts indicating that that dosage might be normal, but only for persons who had been taking the drug long enough to build up a resistance to it. The amount that Gilliland had mentioned—150 milligrams—was only 50 milligrams shy of the amount used to treat hyperactive psychotics, he pointed out. For a normal person without any tolerance to the drug, Mitchell contended, 150 milligrams was enough to make that person comatose.

Despite his efforts, Mitchell could make no headway against Gilliland, who refused to concede that Thorazine was a factor worth considering in determining Rozanne’s cause of death.