Gifford circled around the counsel table and stood well away from Christine. “You’ve never seen Richard Harker before?”
“No—I mean I don’t know. I don’t remember …” Her voice trailed off and Wallace again reminded her that she had to speak louder. “I’m sorry. All of this is hard for me. I’m not used to this.” Wallace nodded sympathetically and told Christine that she should try to stay calm and he would make sure that if she needed a break she would have it.
Jamison sat watching this and focusing on the witness. What he noticed was that Gifford didn’t seem surprised when Christine said she didn’t recognize Harker. That told him that he had expected that answer. Why he expected it was a question that he jotted down for further examination.
“Christine, do you recall ever knowing a man named Richard Harker?”
“It was a long time ago. What I remember is jumbled up with what people have told me. I’ve looked at his picture and I’ve looked at other pictures, but it was a long time ago. I was only three. What I remember is not clear and he looks different than what I remember. Faces change over the years. He could be the man I remember but I can’t be sure. I only remember the face as I saw it then, and even that I don’t remember clearly.”
“I’m sure this is very difficult for you.” Gifford pulled out the declaration that Christine had signed and showed it to her. “Do you remember signing this declaration?”
“Yes.” Her voice was almost a whisper as she nodded but in the stone silence of the courtroom it resonated like a footfall in the night. “I said it wasn’t Rick—Rick Harker—who was there that night when my mother was killed.”
“And was that the truth?”
“Yes, because I remember the face of the man who stood over me in my room. I knew who he was. That’s what I remember now. I knew who he was.”
Gifford paused, holding the moment before asking the next question. “And whose face was that, Christine?
“It was the face of the man I knew as Rick Sample.”
“And is there some reason that you know that?”
“Rick was Tommy’s daddy. He had a little boy named Tommy. Rick lived at our house for a while and sometimes he would bring Tommy over and I played with him. I knew that. The man who stood over me when my mom was killed was Rick Sample. That’s what I remember. And when I realized that, I had to make it right. Rick Harker didn’t murder my mother. I know that now. I’m real sorry that he’s been in prison for that. I was a little girl. I tried to make it right. I signed that paper.” Her mouth contorted as she tried to hold in her emotions.
Gifford wasn’t going to let the moment go. The rustling in the courtroom and the murmuring from reporters and onlookers caused Wallace to tap his pen on the bench for silence. The glowering expression on his face made his point without saying anything further. “And you know now that is the truth? My client didn’t murder your mother?”
“Yes.” Christine’s head tilted forward. Her hair fell across her face, but it didn’t hide her soft whimpering.
“Christine, do you remember testifying in court when you were little, testifying in this case?”
“No, at least not in a way that I can explain it. I know that I said Rick Harker was there that night because that’s what people have told me, but I know now that wasn’t right. I can’t explain. It’s like my memory has a big hole in it. That part is just not there. I … I was so little. My memory of it—I just need it all to go away. I’m sorry.”
Gifford probed gently. “Christine, can you tell us what you remember of that night, the night your mother was murdered?” Gifford glanced back at Jamison, daring him to object at the open-ended question. Jamison kept his impassive expression. He had no intention of objecting. His focus was on letting Gifford draw out as much of Christine’s memory as possible so he could cross-examine.
Christine looked up at the courtroom ceiling and then at a spot on the back wall of the courtroom. Everyone in the courtroom could see her face take on a vacant expression. She looked like a lost child as she began to wander through the minefield of her memory in front of strangers. She talked about her mother, who she called Mama, and she spoke about Tommy, the little boy she remembered, and the man she knew as Tommy’s daddy. And she talked about the other man that she also knew as Rick. She spoke in fragments of images that she tried to relate, explaining that she only remembered bits and pieces. Finally, she said that most of what happened that night and in the courtroom was gone, like it had been wiped clean from her memory. What she remembered was the sound of her mother crying and the man standing over her bed. She had struggled with nightmares, and her agitation and nervousness had gotten worse and worse over time. Images flashed through her head as she slept. And the older she got the worse they were, waking her up to the clamminess of cold sweat and tremors as she grappled with slivers of horrifying images that she couldn’t see clearly. And finally, she had sought help. That was when she met Dr. Vinson. He helped her. And then she remembered and understood what she had kept in the darkness of her memory. What she described as changing from a jumbled blur of violence into images she could at least understand. And all the time Christine talked, not a sound was made in the courtroom as everyone watched her relive the night that had ruined her life. Finally, she stopped and looked around as if she was startled to see everyone present, looking at her. Then she began to weep, the sound erupting from her in convulsive sobs.
Gifford looked up at Wallace, who had reached over and handed Christine a box of tissues, the expression on his face thoughtful as he leaned back in his chair. Gifford said, “I have no further questions at this time, Your Honor. I think we need to take a recess.”
“I agree, but perhaps we should give the witness some time. Should we start in the morning?” Wallace responded.
Gifford shook his head. “Your Honor, I’m sure Ms. Farrow would like to get this over with as soon as possible. Maybe we could just take a longer break than usual?”
“Mr. Jamison?” Wallace looked over at Jamison, waiting for his comment.
Jamison understood why Gifford wanted to force him quickly into cross-examination, and while he wasn’t so cynical that he thought Gifford didn’t care about the emotional state of Christine Farrow, he was cynical enough to believe that part of the defense attorney’s motivation to go forward was to place him at more of a disadvantage. “Your Honor, a couple of points. This is the first time I’ve heard all of this from Ms. Farrow. She hasn’t talked to me or my investigators about this, although we did try. Second, and more importantly, I think she needs time to compose herself, because her cross-examination will probably go on for quite a while.”
Wallace held up his hand blocking further comment from both attorneys. “Tomorrow morning, gentlemen, nine a.m.” Wallace turned to Christine Farrow. “I certainly appreciate that you would like to be done with this. Please try to rest. We will start again tomorrow.”
Jamison looked at his watch. The rest of the day wasn’t much time. He turned to O’Hara. “Tell Ernie to pull up everything on Richard Sample.”
O’Hara snorted. “I told you he was dead.”
Jamison said, “He’s dead now but he wasn’t dead then. We need to know why everyone decided that Sample wasn’t the killer and we need to look at the alibi he had that apparently convinced Jensen, Gage, and Cleary that he was a cold trail.”
“Boss, you do understand that was over twenty-six years ago?”
“That’s why you and Ernie are detectives. If I can show that Sample couldn’t have been the one standing over her, then her whole story comes apart at the seams. Tell Ernie I need it yesterday. And call Dr. Levy. Tell him I need to talk to him.”
Chapter 30
Dr. Aaron Levy and Jamison had a long history going back to when Matt was a young man. He had met Levy through his father, or, perhaps more accurately, because of his father. For reasons Matt had never been able to fathom, his father and Aaron Levy had been friends, but Levy’s insights also caused him
to reach out to Matt. Levy became a secret confidant and a provider of fatherly guidance and more. Over the years, and when Matt became a prosecutor, Levy had also become a source of professional advice who Matt went to when he needed to understand the psychological motivations of the people he dealt with. Levy maintained a clinical practice as well as a professorship at Tenaya State University.
O’Hara spun the wheel of the county car into an open space near Levy’s campus office. Jamison looked over, but O’Hara anticipated the reason. “I’ll stay here while you talk to the shrink, okay?”
O’Hara was way too impatient to sit quietly and listen. He regarded most of what psychologists had to say as babble that only provided excuses. What he never realized, and Jamison did, was that Levy regarded O’Hara with amusement as a walking bundle of psychological stereotypes. He frequently privately referred to him as Matt’s “junkyard dog.” But he also saw and respected the loyalty that flowed from the older investigator. They both shared a form of paternal affection for the young prosecutor.
With his carefully trimmed silver beard and metal-rimmed glasses, Levy was almost as much of a stereotype of a psychologist as Vinson. The aging psychologist listened intently as Jamison explained Christine’s recantation and the circumstances of the murder. It didn’t take Levy long to make an observation. “I know of Dr. Vinson’s work. He deals a lot with people with a history of child abuse, repressed memory. He has theories that I’ve heard. They aren’t widely accepted but there is some measure of accepted credibility in repressed memory. It’s not unusual for witnesses to recant their testimony or identification. Interestingly, the most common cases are murder and sexual abuse. But the key question is why? Usually there is some triggering reason. Something has caused Christine to change her testimony. However, she could be telling the truth and suppressed it all these years. How a child is questioned can affect what they say, but you have recordings and other records of her questioning. Then there is simply lying. The child lies for whatever reason and feels great guilt, which they have suppressed and now it has bubbled to the surface. But people who do this, especially adults struggling with childhood memories, are particularly susceptible to what we call confabulation. It simply means that retrieval of long-term memory has been disrupted. It’s very complex but basically what happens is that a person who is having difficulty with memories has allowed suggestions to simply become the memory. In other words, what they think they remember or what someone suggests to them becomes the memory. And this new memory becomes their truth. They are not lying, at least in the intentional sense. They are telling something untrue that they are convinced is true.
“The process of confabulation is particularly dangerous with hypnosis, which is sometimes used to relax the patient and help them with memory retrieval. Sometimes it is referred to as the misinformation effect.
“My surmise is that Dr. Vinson used hypnosis. It’s a common tool in controlled settings. Recantation cases frequently have hypnosis as a vehicle to pull out allegedly repressed memories. Used carefully it’s useful. Used carelessly it can create memories that the patient believes are true, even though they never occurred. That would be my first guess. Do you have any knowledge as to whether Christine was hypnotized?”
“No, not yet at least. I haven’t cross-examined. Gifford didn’t bring it up. What about all of this lack of memory?”
“Given what this woman lived through, I don’t find that particularly surprising. Besides, do you remember everything that happened to you as a child? A lot of what we see is useless information, clutter that the brain puts away because it’s unnecessary. Sometimes the mind decides what it needs to put away, other kinds of memories that hurt. It’s not gone but it’s like the brain tries to suppress it because it knows that the memory is too painful. This can particularly be true with post-traumatic stress disorder, which this sounds like. Of course, I haven’t talked to Christine but that’s what I suspect.”
“You’re talking about what soldiers sometimes have because of combat?”
Levy walked over to a shelf and pulled down a book that Jamison immediately recognized as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used by psychiatrists and psychologists to diagnose and evaluate psychological disorders. They called it the DSM. Levy flipped through the pages. “Recurrent and intrusive distressing recollections of the trauma, including images, distressing dreams, flashbacks. All of these things can be part of post-traumatic stress. I would be shocked if Christine didn’t have psychological scars. She probably has spent a good portion of her life simply trying to function, and now the underlying reason for her trauma has erupted to the surface after years of being suppressed.”
“Well, does that mean she’s telling the truth?”
Levy was thoughtful. “It means that it is likely she believes she’s telling the truth. It may be the truth. But what is the truth is often far from certain. That’s your job, isn’t it? But I suspect you have more empathy for her than you want, isn’t that perhaps also true?” Levy knew Jamison well enough to understand that he sometimes struggled with what he did. One of the reasons he had become a prosecutor was because his father wasn’t, but he had his own demons that he dealt with.
“I have to cross-examine her.”
“Just remember that she’s very fragile and she’s being asked about things that she probably doesn’t even understand.”
“The evidence says Harker’s guilty of murder.”
Levy slid the DSM back onto the shelf. “But evidence is often based on memory, isn’t it?”
Chapter 31
While Jamison and O’Hara met with Dr. Levy, Ernie drove over to Detective Jensen’s house. He didn’t call first. He expected that Jensen didn’t have many places to go. He wasn’t wrong, Jensen yelled through the window looking out onto the front yard for him to come in. Ernie had seen Jensen at various sheriff’s functions, which were attended by a lot of the retired deputies. Most of the time the old guys sat around together and told lies about their glory days, but they were always treated with respect by the younger deputies, as long as they didn’t have to sit and listen too long.
“What brings you here, Detective Garcia? Still working on that asshole Harker?”
“Still trying to get it sorted out.” Ernie had been warned about Jensen’s drinking and noticed a number of beer bottles on the table next to the chair Jensen sat in. Several still had beads of condensation on them, and it was early in the afternoon.
Jensen caught him looking. “Not much else to do these days. You’ll find out soon enough. Want one?”
Ernie shook his head. “On duty. You understand. Anyway, Jamison wants to know more about the alibi for Rick Sample.”
“Why? Harker did it. I told Jamison that. Didn’t O’Hara tell you?”
“Yeah, he did, but there’s a new wrinkle.”
“What’s that?”
“Christine Farrow just testified that the killer was Rick Sample.”
“Well, that’s bullshit. She identified Harker and she testified in court that he was the one.”
“All true, Mike, but Jamison says we need to look at the reason Sample was ruled out, and if we can prove that then Christine’s whole story gets blown apart. So, I figured I’d start with you.”
Jensen sat back in his recliner. “Have you looked at my reports on this?”
“Better to start with you and get the whole story if you can remember all of it. Then I’ll go pull all the reports and begin backtracking.”
Nodding at Garcia’s logic, Jensen leaned forward and got up, relishing the opportunity to relive the past with somebody new. “Gonna get another beer. Sure you don’t want one?”
Jensen settled back in and started talking. Ernie didn’t interrupt. He would save his questions for the end. Jensen was nothing if not thorough, and since he was the central figure in the story, he began with his opinion of the case being reopened. That took five minutes, mostly filled with barnyard expletives that Jensen had apparently managed to st
ore like a thesaurus. Ernie began to wonder how many words for shit that Jensen had. But he knew he had to be patient.
Jensen recounted that Christine Farrow’s grandmother, Barbara, had led them down the wrong path when she said that Christine’s ID of Rick was Rick Sample. It was true that later they determined that Sample and Harker looked a lot alike. But Jensen also added that in his experience, white trash looked like all other white trash so he wasn’t surprised. Ernie remained silent. There was no point in disagreeing because it would just result in diverting the conversation while he got an earful of Jensen’s old cop philosophy, much of which would include what was now called inappropriate profiling. Ernie knew that nothing much had changed except cops now came up with more sophisticated explanations for why they could look at somebody and spot trouble.
First Jensen had put out an all-points bulletin, an APB, on Sample and then went to his last known address, which he pulled from Sample’s contact cards that were available to him. Even though now almost everything had been put into some kind of computer file, back then the various law enforcement agencies kept alphabetized card files with contacts on them, so they could backtrack on the activities of troublemakers. But given the expansion of the criminal population, technology had likewise evolved. Now card files were a thing of the past. But back then they showed Sample lived with his mother, or at least slept there according to his files.
Jensen contacted the mother at her home, which was in a newer residential area of tract houses. Jensen recalled being a little surprised because it didn’t fit his expectations. Sample’s mother had answered the door. “I remember that her name was Dolores, but she told me to call her Dori. She was good-looking. I remember that. Looked younger than I expected too. Good figure, kinda busting out, you know?” The look on Jensen’s face told Ernie that Jensen had probably revisited that image a number of times. “Anyway, she told me that her son wasn’t at home. She said he had been at a baseball game in LA, a Dodger game during the time when the murder occurred. There was a Dodger game with the Giants in LA the day Lisa was killed. It didn’t take us long to bag Sample up, but he had ticket stubs for the game and he had a buddy with him. He couldn’t have been there and here at the same time. I questioned him, and he had everything down as far as the game was concerned.”
Shades of Truth Page 20
