But I Trusted You and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  Callas had even contacted George Cody, Teresa’s first attorney, and asked him if she’d changed her features with plastic surgery. Cody was noncommittal. He said he hadn’t seen Teresa since early November 1997.

  Nor had Nick.

  And then he had tracked her to Puerto Rico, finally realizing that she had broken her promises to him and left him responsible for the huge bail she forfeited.

  John Henry Browne began his cross-examination by asking Nick Callas to read aloud portions of the sentimental cards Teresa had given him. The witness began, his voice filled with emotion:

  “ ‘Nick, you give me peace that I’ve never had. Thank you for you.’ ”

  Callas looked up, tears glistening in his eyes, and with his voice breaking he said, “I don’t know if I can do this.”

  “Well,” Browne said, “take a minute. Wait a minute, Nick. Why don’t you just read it over to yourself. Is there something in that card that indicates—”

  “I haven’t finished yet. I’m sorry,” Callas said. Tears now spilled from his eyes and ran down his cheeks. He took a deep breath and started the next sentence: “ ‘I know I have caused you pain, and I cannot tell you how sorry I am for that. The outside world—’ ”

  Nick Callas could not continue, and asked if he could leave the courtroom to gather his emotions. Judge Knight nodded. When he returned, he was able to get through the words that Teresa had written, private and personal words his wife had read, that now a gallery full of strangers and court personnel listened to. He had been touched by those two cards and believed that Teresa really was grateful for everything he’d done for her—before and after Chuck’s murder.

  Reading them again tore him up emotionally.

  John Henry Browne asked him about Teresa’s overdose in August 1997, and Callas recalled that it had happened shortly after she was told she could no longer have her weekly phone calls to her daughter: “She was expecting to, and excited to speak with Morgan on that Wednesday and getting prepared for it, and either she made a call to set it up or they called her and said she wouldn’t be allowed to speak with Morgan again.”

  “Can you tell the … jury your understanding of Teresa’s relationship with Morgan?” Browne probed.

  Nick Callas nodded. Even though he had never laid eyes on Morgan himself, or, for that matter, seen Teresa interact with her child, he had observed Teresa’s feelings for her.

  “All mothers love their children,” he began, “love their children, but Teresa loved Morgan in a different way. I really don’t know how to describe it. It’s hard to say that one parent can love their daughter or son more than another parent, but Teresa’s life was dedicated to Morgan … one hundred percent of the time Teresa does something for Morgan without doing something for herself. I know that’s why I sent money to her.”

  “Were there ever any discussions between you and Teresa about getting married?” Browne asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you have any feeling that Teresa was unhappy with the relationship the way it was?”

  “No.”

  “Were there any plans for Teresa and Morgan to move to Hawaii?”

  “No.”

  “Did you have any plans to divorce Grace?”

  “No.”

  Callas seemed to have been completely unaware of Teresa’s plans to come to Hawaii, marry him, arrange to give him his own child—even if it took a surrogate mother to carry it. With questioning from both Michael Downes and John Henry Browne, Nick Callas’s male parts were discussed in open court. He explained why he was completely unable to provide healthy sperm to his wife or to any other woman. It was obvious that this was information Teresa was hearing for the first time. Shock washed across her face, although she quickly masked it.

  Teresa’s pie-in-the-sky plans had been just that. There was no way she could have had a child with Nick—none at all. He believed she was a wonderful, unselfish mother, but he had never met Morgan, never seen her beyond a photograph. He hadn’t known that Teresa was determined to marry him. There were so many things he hadn’t known about her.

  Finally, after hours of torturous testimony, Nick Callas was allowed to step down.

  Joyce Lilly testified about the early morning hours of February 20. The jury listened avidly as she told them what Teresa had said about “whacking” Chuck, her “murder costume,” and how she—Joyce—had been stuck with the physical evidence of the murder, right down to the .45 automatic, the bullets, and the key to Chuck’s house.

  She was an emotional witness. It was plain that she would rather have been anywhere but in the witness chair, still half guilty about betraying her old friend. Even so, Joyce had no other choice.

  The question that hung in the air concerned two possible witnesses—Teresa Gaethe-Leonard, herself, and Morgan “Punky” Leonard. It is almost always unwise for murder defendants to take the witness stand. In doing so, they open themselves up to cross-examination by the State with questions they might not care to answer.

  Although she was a very intelligent little girl, Morgan was only six. She had been through so much, and neither Michael Downes nor John Henry Browne wanted to bring her into this trial. Downes weighed whether he would have to do it to assure that Morgan’s father received the justice he deserved.

  Teresa sobbed at the thought of Morgan testifying, and said she would plead guilty before she let that happen.

  In the end, neither mother nor daughter testified.

  There was much discussion about a film Chuck Leonard had taken with frames that showed his daughter. When it finally was shown, it was anticlimactic; it turned out to be a long, boring home movie with nothing more salacious than a tiny girl in a play pool.

  Teresa—along with her sisters who were there to support her—cried periodically throughout her three-week trial, giving some credence to the Defense contention that she was mentally ill and had been insane at the time she shot Chuck Leonard.

  Now came the battle of the psychologists and psychiatrists. Listening to and evaluating testimony by mental health professionals is often supremely frustrating, generally because they tend to use terms unfamiliar to laymen and even to those with quite a bit of knowledge about mental illness and personality disorders. Moreover, they often waffle and seem unable to give a straight-out diagnosis. That was certainly true of those who testified at Teresa’s trial.

  None of them appeared to have brought their records on Teresa Gaethe-Leonard to court with them. They often couldn’t recall dates or seemed surprised when they learned that some of the things Teresa had told them weren’t true.

  One psychiatrist estimated that the defendant had undergone about fifty emotional, intelligence, and sanity tests, and seen more psychiatric experts than anyone could count.

  Some who testified hadn’t seen Teresa in a year or more. The trial transcripts show that none of these witnesses would say definitively that Teresa had a low IQ or an average IQ —even though her test results indicated her score was only 83. Nor would any experts say absolutely that she was malingering or suffering from real post-traumatic stress disorder, or even if her “hallucinations” were actual or contrived.

  One psychiatrist—who had seen Teresa for approximately six two-hour sessions—testified that she had become depressed when her marriage faltered in 1991, and that depression reached “clinical proportions” by the fall of 1996 —approximately when Teresa did her dry-run with a borrowed gun.

  As this doctor spoke, Teresa bowed her head and rocked slightly in her chair. She turned often to look back at her sisters in the gallery; they, too, were tearful.

  She had told this psychiatrist that she finally became depressed enough to fly off to Puerto Rico because she’d received a box containing all the cards and presents—still unwrapped—that she’d sent to Morgan at her aunt Theresa’s address. But that wasn’t true; Theresa testified that Morgan had opened all the presents and cards, and that she still had them and knew her mother had sent them.

  This
psychiatrist for the defense said that Teresa had only sparse memories of driving to Chuck’s house on the night he died or of what had happened while she was there. He testified that he believed Teresa was psychotic at the time she shot Chuck and suffering from acute stress.

  That diagnosis, however, seemed at war with Teresa’s November late-night visit to Chuck’s bedroom when she was armed with a borrowed gun. One had to wonder if she had been insane then, too, regained her sanity, and then lost contact with reality once more three months later. Both forays had required considerable planning, enough to make her low scores on IQ tests and her confused, “psychotic” state questionable.

  After final arguments on Tuesday, September 29, 1998, where Michael Downes described Teresa as a calculating killer who shot Chuck Leonard so she could marry her wealthy lover, and John Henry Browne called her a fragile, abused woman who was desperately trying to protect her daughter, it was almost time for Teresa’s jury to retire to deliberate.

  Neither the State nor the Defense spared the details of Chuck Leonard’s gruesome and bloody death. He had lived long enough to chase Teresa up the ship staircase and even managed to grab her ankle with his last ounce of strength.

  John Henry Browne pointed out that the evidence wasn’t in the three bullets Teresa had fired nineteen months before, but in the four she didn’t fire. He suggested that if Teresa had truly intended to kill Chuck, she would have shot at him again at that time.

  But she didn’t.

  Chuck was already a dead man walking, but Browne didn’t say that.

  Had Teresa planned the murder of her estranged husband and her escape to Puerto Rico methodically—right down to her plastic surgery? She’d told her attorney that she had facial surgery not so she would look different but because she didn’t want to look like her mother, who had caused her much pain when she was a child. This was the same mother she once said she loved dearly and joined in Texas for a vacation every year.

  Prosecutor Michael Downes reminded jurors that Teresa had been consumed by her desire to move to Hawaii to marry Nick Callas, and that Chuck Leonard was in her way. She had planned her crime, even to the point that she told Joyce Lilly “that she was going to ‘whack Chuck tonight.’ ”

  The Defense position that Chuck was molesting their daughter hadn’t come up until a very long time—months—later.

  The jurors wouldn’t hear of all the lies and variations of the truth that Teresa had practiced in her life; it would be impossible to take all the little threads left dangling and crochet them into a recognizable pattern. Indeed, no one really knew how many lies, con games, and self-serving statements Teresa might have employed for years. It would be akin to counting pennies in a gallon jar.

  As Browne finished his final arguments, he looked at Teresa, who sat with her head bowed, staring at a small picture of Morgan, which was propped against a box of tissues out of the jury’s view.

  In a bit of courtroom drama, he glanced at her and said, “Teresa, Morgan knows. She knows what you did and why you did it. Do you understand that?”

  Teresa didn’t look up.

  The rule of thumb in trials is generally that the longer the jury stays out deliberating, the more likely they are to acquit. A rapid decision usually means a guilty verdict. But it isn’t carved in stone. Teresa was charged with both first-degree murder and bail jumping.

  In less than three hours, the foreman signaled that the jury had a verdict. When the principals and the gallery had all gathered in the courtroom, the jury foreman handed the verdict to the bailiff.

  There was a hush in the room, as the bailiff unfolded the paper with the jury’s decision on it.

  “We, the jury, find Teresa Gaethe Leonard … guilty of murder in the first degree.”

  They had also found her guilty on the second, lesser charge of bail jumping.

  One of Chuck’s friends let out a muffled sigh of relief. Theresa Leonard, his sister, began to cry quietly. Teresa Gaethe-Leonard herself sat still as a stone, her spine straight, and then dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. Her attorneys seemed more shaken than she was.

  And so did the jurors who filed out rapidly, waving away reporters. Some stopped to light cigarettes. Others hurried to their cars.

  Sentencing was set for October 16, but that would be postponed until Wednesday, November 25. Once again, the holiday season was bleak for Teresa, all because of her own doing. In November 1996, Teresa had put on her “camouflage” clothing and gone to Chuck’s house to shoot him, but been put off because Michelle Conley was with him. In November 1997, she underwent plastic surgery and stole her friend’s ID as she prepared to fly to Puerto Rico, and now, as Thanksgiving and Christmas decorations appeared in the Snohomish County Courthouse, she would hear her sentence as a convicted murderess.

  Teresa had walked into the courtroom between her two tall attorneys, and that made her seem even more frail and diminutive. She had always hated to wear handcuffs, and she asked to have them removed before she entered the room, but her guards refused. She was both an escape and a suicide risk. The gallery was full to bursting as curious onlookers made room for just one more person on the long benches.

  Several of the people impacted by Chuck’s death would probably speak; the attorneys would speak, and perhaps even Teresa would make a statement before Judge Gerald Knight handed down the sentence.

  According to Washington State statute, Teresa’s sentencing range would be between twenty-six and thirty-four years in prison. Prosecutor Michael Downes requested that she receive a sentence at the high end of the range, and her defense attorney, John Henry Browne, asked for a twenty-five-year term, saying, “Truth generally lies between the extremes.”

  Theresa Leonard, who now had permanent custody of Morgan, attempted to explain the tremendous loss her brother’s murder was for her family. Most of all, it was difficult to explain to six-year-old Morgan.

  “She’s grieving the loss of both her father and her mother,” Theresa said. “Chuck was many things to many people. He drove fast, played hard, and loved many. No doubt he loved blondes. [But] he never pulled any punches with kids. He was direct and honest with them. He loved Morgan without reservation.”

  Teresa stood before Judge Knight, speaking in his courtroom for the first time.

  “I wrote this probably fifty-five times, trying to make it short so you would listen,” she began, but as she went on she became increasingly emotional. “A mother’s basic instinct is to protect her child, which was my motivating action. … Punky, I kept my promise to you that you would not suffer through a family life like my own.”

  It was time for Judge Knight to pronounce sentence and to make any remarks he might have. During a trial, no one knows what the judge is thinking any more than he or she can read jurors’ minds. This was the moment when Judge Gerald Knight could voice his opinion.

  “I do not believe that Mr. Leonard abused his daughter,” Judge Knight said firmly. He told Teresa that it didn’t matter what she might have believed about that, her decision to act as “judge, jury, and executioner” had ended in miserable tragedy for many people. She had left her child a virtual orphan without either parent.

  Judge Knight then sentenced Teresa Gaethe-Leonard to thirty years in prison.

  * * *

  On December 3, 1998, Teresa entered the Washington State prison system. She was incarcerated at the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Purdy. She joined a roster of infamous female felons, such as Diane Downs, Mary Kay Letourneau, and Christine Marler. Teresa’s earliest release date is July 29, 2023, and her maximum expiration of sentence is November 11, 2027. In either case, she will be over sixty when she walks out of prison. Even then, she will have to have two years of monitored community placement before she is completely free.

  Teresa’s plan is to move back to New Orleans and join her sister Lois.

  Teresa has been a relatively cooperative prisoner, although she was reported for having intimate contact with another female pris
oner when correction officers found them kissing.

  Teresa’s sisters have stood by her, sending her mail-

  order items of clothing, underwear, makeup, and magazines. She has been assigned to work with guide and service dogs, and that has brought her some serenity.

  Does Nick Callas write to Teresa while she is in prison? I honestly don’t know. His real estate business is booming and he is doing well. As for his personal life, that has faded from the public eye.

  Teresa has no contact at all with her daughter, Morgan, who is now seventeen and just graduated from high school. She has never asked to see photographs of Morgan, although she could have if she had gone through Morgan’s counselor.

  Morgan had three years of therapy right after Chuck’s death to help her deal with her losses. She was very fragile and had nightmares, mostly about her mother. It took her nearly a year to begin to accept that “my mommy killed my daddy.” Sometimes she had good dreams where she woke up saying she felt “Daddy hugging me.”

  Today, Morgan is a bright, talented teenager who shares a special bond with her aunt Theresa, and Theresa’s daughter, her “sister.” She has also met her older half-sister and has a warm secure family to replace the one she lost.

  When asked if she wanted to have a different name in this book to protect her privacy, she said no. She wants the truth to be told, and that includes her name. Soon, she will be on her way to college.

  Morgan, like Chuck, loves kittens and cats. She still has the cat her dad gave her in October 1996, and the Leo-nards have four more cats, bringing the number of feline pets to the same number Chuck had. They talk about Chuck openly and tell funny stories. Morgan wears his old sweaters around the house and keeps his photographs prominent in her life.