by Dan Decker
Judge Anderson looked at Keith. “Mister Williams, do you have any questions for the witness?”
“Yeah, just a few.” Keith moved until he stood at the lectern, in contrast with me he had just taken a single sheet of paper. I had sat in on a couple of his trials, and he liked to work from a binder as well, so I figured he had done this just to set himself apart from me.
“Officer Hopkins. We thank you for your service. Being an officer of the law is not an easy thing to do.” Keith let those words hang for a moment before he went on. “Now Officer Hopkins, were you there during the investigation of the crime scene?”
“I was.”
“Did you check for fingerprints?”
“I did not.”
“What did you do?”
“I secured the scene and kept watch while Detective Gray and the crime scene investigators did their work.”
“You were basically on guard duty.”
“Yeah.” Hopkins shifted and looked uncomfortable.
“Did you have any concrete reasons for suspecting Timothy prior to the examination of the crime scene?”
“No, like I said, it was just instinct.” Officer Hopkins was turning red in the face again and I was curious about Keith’s line of questioning.
“You never got to motive then, correct?”
“Well I wouldn’t say that.”
“Meaning?”
“Well, I canvassed the neighbors.”
I saw where Keith was going now and knew there was little I could do about it. Sometimes the facts were just bad.
“This was after your initial arrival at the scene?”
“Yes, the next day. I was back on shift and helped Detective Gray do interviews of other tenants in the building.”
“Did anything interesting come out of this?”
“Yeah, it sounded like Timothy and the victim fought frequently.”
“Do you recall the name of the neighbor you talked with?”
“Yeah, Lance Beal.”
“Can you describe what Lance said he heard?”
“Just some shouting. It was at various times of the day, once late at night. I guess Lance works from home and rarely goes out.”
Keith nodded. “Based on what you found, would you say Timothy had a contentious relationship with Gordon?”
“For sure, there were signs of other things as well. There was a hole in the wall where it looked like somebody had sent a fist through.”
I had not made too much of that because it had been right by the door and figured it had been done when somebody had pushed the door handle too hard.
Keith made another note. “Is it fair to say that there was tension between the two?”
“I would say more than that, it was a lot more than that.”
“Could you please be specific?”
“Well, we tracked down a former girlfriend of the victims—Lizzie Bark—and it turned out she had once gone with Timothy as well. When she heard Gordon was dead, the first words out of her mouth were, did Timothy do it?”
Keith smiled. “Your Honor, I have no further questions.”
After Keith sat down, the judge looked at Miss Noyce who deferred from asking any questions.
“The witness is excused. Call your next, counselor.”
Frank stood. “The state calls Detective Stephanie Gray to the stand.”
48
July 25 – 11:03 AM
In all the time that Stephanie and I had occasion to run into each other during the course of my practice, I had never once cross-examined her on the stand. This was not something I was looking forward to, so I had spent most of the time preparing my questions for her.
Once Stephanie had been sworn in, Frank walked to the lectern. “Can you please tell us about the events on the morning of May 29?”
“I received a call about a homicide and responded. Officer Hopkins had already secured the scene when I arrived.”
“Can you take us through your impressions of the crime scene as you entered, specifically relating to the actions of the defendant Timothy Cooper?”
“I would be happy to.” Stephanie glanced at me and I was certain I was not going to like what came next. “When I entered, Officer Hopkins first introduced me to Timothy Cooper, the roommate of the victim. He was pale and nervous. Timothy spent an inordinate amount of time checking his phone, as if he were communicating with somebody.”
Stephanie glanced at me. She knew Timothy had been talking to me. I stared back without blinking.
A man had a right to counsel.
I would make a motion to keep this little sequence from being included at trial, mainly because they were trying to make a lot of it. There was little I could do about it today, but I would plan for it in the future. Frank would have been better off to skip over this part and try to get it in front of the jury. This was one of the reasons why a preliminary hearing could sometimes be helpful.
“When you say the defendant looked pale and jittery, what did you make of it?”
“He kept tapping his foot and rubbing the front of his head. I could tell he was agitated about something.”
“Did any theories come to mind?”
“Several did, but they were more instinctual in nature, and I would prefer not to talk about them. Rather, I would like to talk about the hard evidence we discovered at the scene of the crime.”
I hid a smile. Frank had set this up and Stephanie had responded in this way, to clean up the mess Officer Hopkins had made earlier about all that instincts garbage. If I had to venture a guess, this had probably been part of their plan for some time. Officer Hopkins seemed like a difficult man to work with and rather than convince him to stick only to the facts, they had just decided to get him up there first and clean up afterward. This was probably part of the reason why Frank had not asked about the neighbors or the girlfriend. He wanted that introduced by Stephanie, who was a more credible source. Keith had gotten ahead of him on that.
“Before we get there, please tell us more about the defendant’s behavior.”
“Sure. I’ve mentioned he was nervous. I even caught a whiff of vomit on him, at one point he was sitting in a chair in the dining area of the apartment, looking at his phone, and rocking back and forth. At times, he even muttered something under his breath. I have dealt many times with people in a situation like this and have developed some skill in helping them deal with a crisis.”
“Did you try to comfort him in any way?”
“I did.”
“How did he respond?”
“A lot of people would have focused on the victim, what the victim had lost, or what the victim had meant to them. Timothy was more focused on the wound.” Stephanie shook her head as if trying to recall, I suspected this was an act on her part to look more convincing. “I heard him say ‘his whole head is gone,’ several times. He kept touching the front of his own head. Forensic analysis of the body determined the bullet entered through the victim’s forehead.”
“What did you think when you observed all of this?”
“To be honest, I did not make much of it.”
This was smart, she wanted to downplay her analysis and give the judge a chance to form his own opinion.
“One explanation is that it was quite shocking for him to find his roommate in this way, so it would be easy to fixate on that, especially late in the evening after the stress of studying for final exams.” Stephanie took a moment to breathe and I could tell she was carefully formulating what she was going to say next. “Another explanation could be that he might be assuaging his guilt in some way.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not a psychologist.”
I studied Stephanie, wondering if this was something the two of them had rehearsed. She appeared to give equal time to both theories, she did not need to say which one she thought was correct, it was obvious.
This was a solid approach considering the mess Officer Hopkins had made, I could see what they were trying to do and judging by the ra
pt attention Judge Anderson was giving Stephanie, it looked like it was working. Frank was trying to re-establish the credibility Officer Hopkins had lost. It was becoming even more apparent now why Officer Hopkins had been first on the list.
Frank Ward was getting better.
I had suspected before he had a mentor, and now, I was certain of it. Frank was not where he needed to be, but the progress he had made was quite substantial and even a little surprising.
I leaned back in my seat as the questioning continued, trying to figure out my best approach with Stephanie.
“At this point in the investigation, even before you went and looked at the body, did you consider Timothy a suspect?”
“Of course, but I would not say that was because of anything other than just my experience. Yes, he was acting strangely, stressful times make people do things different than they might otherwise.” The more she tried to show empathy, the more Judge Anderson was buying it. Stephanie would have made a great prosecuting attorney. “As there was no forced entry, odds were good that the perpetrator of the crime knew the victim. I was not going to discount him as a possible suspect until I had proof otherwise.”
Frank nodded, clearly satisfied with her answer. “Please go ahead and describe the crime scene.”
Stephanie gave a lengthy description that was exhaustive. After several follow-up questions on that, Frank returned to Timothy.
“I understand defendant Timothy Cooper left the apartment at some point during the morning. Is that correct?”
“Yes. His attorney came.”
Even though I was going to move to have this part suppressed, all I could do was just sit there for now and take it. Frank knew this would not be admissible in trial, but he was hoping to establish enough guilt to get my client bound over, even if he had to take a little leeway to do it. This was an interesting strategy and made me think he felt his case was weak enough that he needed to prop it up.
It is just a stall tactic.
Frank might be hoping to find more evidence and wanted Timothy headed to trial while they worked to uncover it. It was either that or he intended to make another offer after today, hoping that Timothy would be scared. That was not a bad tactic either, considering the mental state of my client.
Judge Anderson did not look my way and I was not able to get a read on what he thought of this line of questioning.
“At what point in the investigation did you start to become convinced that Timothy Cooper was the perpetrator of the crime?”
“While I had some questions about the way he behaved during the course of our investigation, it became apparent that much of the apartment was undisturbed. Nothing was stolen. While we did not find the murder weapon at that time, we were starting to think that based on the entirety of the crime scene and the fact that Timothy Cooper’s fingerprints were all over—including in the victim’s bathroom—and the fact we hadn’t found many others, that we knew who had done it.”
“Did you talk to the neighbors of the victim?”
“Yes. Officer Hopkins was with me.”
“What did you find?”
“We learned there had been arguments in the past, and even one that was more recent, between the victim and defendant Timothy Cooper. During the course of that we also discovered that the victim’s ex-girlfriend had also dated Timothy Cooper. We naturally thought that this was highly interesting, so we tracked down the girlfriend.”
“And what did the girlfriend say?”
“When we told her the victim was dead, the very first thing she asked us was, ‘did Timothy Cooper do it?’”
If this was a trial I would be making objections all over the place, but the judge didn’t even blink.
Frank Ward took a moment to review his notepad before he went on. “Now I would like to change the line of questioning. During your first investigation of the apartment, did you find the murder weapon?”
Stephanie now had a little color on her face, she shook her head. “We did not.”
“When did you find the murder weapon?”
“It was brought to our attention by defendant Timothy Cooper’s attorney, Mister Turner.”
“Could you explain?”
“Yes. I received a text message from Mister Turner, asking to meet with me. When we did, he explained he had been doing his own review of the crime scene after we had released it and had found a 9 mm pistol.”
“What did you do upon receiving this information?”
“I called in our crime scene investigation team to review the apartment one more time.”
“Was there anything else?”
“Yes. Mister Turner also found an empty piece of brass as well as a tube of lip gloss.”
“Did you find fingerprints on any of these items?”
“Yes, only the lip gloss.”
“Whose fingerprints did you find on the lip gloss.”
“Those of Barbara Howard Smith.”
“When did you learn about the presence of the lip gloss?”
“This was also something Mister Turner had found during his review of the crime scene; unfortunately, he had not thought it relevant until recently.”
I looked straight ahead as my cheeks reddened. I was still embarrassed by the mistake. Stephanie was handling her embarrassment well enough so I took strength from her example and did the same.
Frank paused and I expected he was going to ask some additional questions about the lip gloss, but he didn’t. He probably figured that he would just leave it to the other defense attorneys. It was what I would have done in his shoes.
“Detective Gray, why did you guys miss the pistol, the empty brass, and lip gloss?”
“I can’t tell you. We did a thorough review of the apartment, we even have pictures of the place where both the lip gloss and the brass were later found. They came out of nowhere.”
“Did you suspect they had been planted?”
“Yes, we did.”
“I’m assuming you did an investigation into this as well?”
“We did.”
“What were the results?”
“Inconclusive. It did not look like the door to the apartment had been forced the first time we took control of the scene. Upon our review the second time, it appeared this way as well. The security cameras in the apartment building were not working. We released the scene on the night of June 5. Mister Turner was there the morning of June 6 and unless somebody had inside knowledge, there is no way the murder weapon, the brass, and the lip gloss could have been planted. We did not even inform Mister Turner that the scene had been released until an hour before he went over.”
Something tickled the back of my mind.
Security cameras.
I thought of the doorbell camera I’d seen on my way to the courthouse and remembered where I’d seen it before.
In the hallway of Timothy Cooper’s apartment.
As the realization flooded through me, I took hold of my emotions and forced myself to pay attention.
“Do you believe it’s possible Mitch Turner planted the evidence and lied?” Frank asked.
Stephanie shook her head. “If you’re asking if I think it’s possible, sure. I guess anything is possible, right?” She shook her head again. “The problem with that though is it made the case against his client that much stronger.” Timothy stirred beside me but I refrained from looking at him. “If I had been Mister Turner and had wanted to plant evidence, I would’ve planted it someplace else that would not have looked bad for my client.”
“Were ballistics performed on the 9 mm pistol?”
“Yes. It was indeed the murder weapon.”
“Why do you think you missed the weapon?”
“It was buried in the couch,” Stephanie was getting a little terse now. “We went over the place with a fine-tooth comb, but the tear it had been forced into was tiny, it’s quite remarkable Mister Turner found it at all.”
“Again, why did you not find it?” Frank Ward was being persiste
nt, to try to obviate the need for one of the other defense attorneys to dig into this issue by taking the latitude to embarrass her himself.
“Look, about the only way we would have found it, would’ve been by accident or if we would have taken a knife and literally torn apart the whole apartment. The mattress was given a thorough examination, as was the room where the victim was found. We had no reason to pay special attention to the couch other than to perform a basic search, which we did.”
“What is your theory as to why you missed the lip gloss or the brass?”
“To be frank, I don’t have one. This sequence is quite as shocking to me as it is to you. It could have been planted after the fact, but unfortunately, we found no evidence that would support that. Perhaps they both got stuck under the couch and the brass and the lip gloss had been jostled loose when we were doing our investigation. Or maybe Mitch did something to loosen it.”
Mitch?
“This is an egregious mistake, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes. It is. All of us were very ashamed.” Stephanie spoke through clenched teeth. I was just glad that nobody was gonna to put me on the stand today to make me look bad.
“After you had the murder weapon, why did you then look at Barbara and Ron Cooper.”
“This was again brought to us by Timothy Cooper’s attorney.”
Timothy stirred beside me, but I didn’t look at him. We’d already been over this and I wasn’t going to apologize.
“Mister Turner’s investigator turned up a connection between Ron Cooper and Barbara Howard Smith. Barbara Smith was the victim’s aunt and Ron Cooper was our prime suspect’s father, we thought it was worth looking into.”
Timothy was bristling now, but I still did not look over.
“And what did you discover?”
“We found that both Smith and Cooper, Ron Cooper, were in town the night that Gordon died. They checked into a motel at about 1:15 AM.”
“Why was this interesting to you?”
“The time of death of the victim was just after midnight. We also learned that they had a reservation at the restaurant Monteverde that night and when we followed up, it turned out they had not kept the appointment. It appears they are regulars there.”
