With Janelle, it was antipathy at first sight. When Connie trudged up to the witness box, Janelle leaned over and whispered to me that she looked like an ear of ripe sweet corn still in the husk. But then we had to remember, she was all of seventeen.
Reardon waited until she had settled in the box before he rose from his seat, walked all the way around the defense table, and stood beside his client. When he reached down, the Defendant flinched, but the jury may not have seen it since Reardon blocked their view and Reardon ignored him. He took the cross that hung around the Defendant’s neck into his hand and held it out as far as the chain would allow for Connie to see.
“Have you seen this cross before?” Reardon asked.
Connie’s gaze rested on her husband’s face. She barely glanced at Reardon’s hand before she said, “For sure,” and returned her eyes to the Defendant’s face.
Reardon opened and closed his mouth, probably suppressing annoyance at a response that suggested how shallow and dim she was.
“Where did your husband get this cross?” Reardon said.
“I bought it for him.”
If she’d been a little girl bestowing a gift on daddy, she couldn’t have looked prouder. Some of us thought it was kind of early in her testimony for it to develop an uncomfortable edge.
“When?”
“The weekend before he turned himself in.”
“When you purchased this cross, did you get a receipt?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Did you keep it?”
“Oh, yeah. I always get a buy slip and I always keep it.”
Reardon let the cross fall back onto his client’s chest. The Defendant swiveled his head with a jerk and sat back. The inference that he felt scalded by human touch should not have surprised me.
Legs handed Reardon a folder from which he removed a slip of paper and handed it to Connie.
“This . . . “ Reardon started.
“Objection,” Crandall said, up and already moving toward the bench.
“ . . . the receipt?” Reardon finished, a smile forming.
“Approach,” Crandall demanded, stepping to the witness box and picking the receipt from Connie’s hand.
Secrist apparently thought the matter deserved more than a sidebar. He sent the jury out.
Crandall argued the receipt was inadmissible because it was not disclosed as a defense exhibit prior to trial and he had not seen it before today. He also gave Reardon a little hell for harpooning him by identifying what the paper was after he stated the objection.
Reardon shrugged and ignored it. He argued he didn’t know he would need to introduce the receipt until Lottie testified about seeing the cross and anyway the police had the opportunity to seize the receipt when they searched the Defendant’s family home after his arrest. That was where he found it, Reardon said. He just asked Connie.
“Perhaps,” said Reardon, “it was just another example of sloppy footwork on the investigators’ part.”
Secrist turned to Crandall and raised his brows, but Crandall was staring at Reardon over the top of his glasses. His head might’ve been down, but Crandall was looking up at Reardon from the bottom of a trap. Reardon was not only going to undercut Lottie’s tenuous identification of the Defendant, he was going to do it in a way that would call into question other aspects of the investigation.
“Get on with it, gentlemen,” Secrist said. He waited until the jury returned before he said, for the record, “Overruled.”
Reardon welcomed the jury back with a full-scale victory smile, just to give them a little hint of what he was going to do next. But when Reardon handed Connie the receipt again and asked her whether it was the receipt she had testified about earlier, she looked at it for moments longer than should have been necessary.
“That’s it,” she said finally and brightly, as though she’d just remembered something she’d been told.
“What’s the date on the receipt?”
She gave it without hesitation, indeed without looking again at the receipt.
Reardon scanned the jury and said, “After your husband was arrested, the police searched your house, did they not?”
“Yes.”
“They took from your house items belonging to you and your husband when they did that?”
“Gobs.”
“Gobs,” Reardon repeated diffidently. “Did they take that receipt?
“Well,” said Connie to kind of turn the key. She closed her eyes and, in a gush, said, “They went through all my drawers and I keep my buy slips in one of them and they went through it but they didn’t take that one, no.”
She opened her eyes and grinned shyly at her husband as if to check whether she’d done it right. If there was a reaction to be read, no one, including Connie, saw it.
As the receipt passed from juror to juror, each looked to Crandall. Twelve of them as well as the two alternates wanted to know why Lottie had identified the Defendant by jewelry that had been purchased after the crime and probably why Crandall let her do it. From their expressions, Reardon surely knew then he had primed the jury to at least listen to what Connie had to say about the Defendant’s alibi.
Their son was two at the time, Connie said. She had put him to bed at his regular time, around nine o’clock, on the night of the murders. She had the boy kiss his daddy good night, she put the boy to sleep in their room, where he always slept, and she went to bed herself.
She did not know when her husband came to bed that night, but she had awakened, looked at the clock, and the hands were straight up. He was there then. That much she knew. He had been with her and their child the rest of the night.
She was sure of that, too. He was her husband. When he left their bed, she knew it. When he did not, she knew that, too.
There would be no shaking her from those details. Whether her testimony was plausible or even rational was of no consequence to her. She came not to state facts or to persuade, but to gaze upon him. Throughout her direct testimony, her expression was dreamy, and she looked nowhere but at him. She was a Jonestown girl; she’d drink the Kool-Aid and ask for more.
One of the men on the jury smiled and another nodded appreciatively at a point or two during Connie’s testimony when her devotion was most bald, but her demeanor seemed to irk not only Janelle but at least a couple of the women on the jury. From the set of their mouths, all three could have been biting seeds into their gums.
Crandall asked for a recess before he began his cross. In light of recent events, he said, he thought the State was entitled to one, just a short one. Secrist agreed without even consulting Reardon.
During the ten minutes that others got up and stretched, chatted, or moved in and out of the courtroom to address bodily functions, Crandall remained seated at the State’s table, desultorily running a finger down page after page of a fat, three-ring binder. When he found the information he wanted, he clipped a pen to the page, snapped the binder shut, and let his chin sink to his chest, as though he intended to nap.
Crandall took stock of the jurors before he rose. Knowing him, he probably had three or four lines of questions ready, but his selection seemed tailored to them.
“You were how old when you married your husband?”
“Fifteen.”
“And you were pregnant at the time?”
“Yes.”
“You were what? Fourteen? When the Defendant impregnated you.”
The verb, no doubt carefully selected, was inspired; it sounded completely clinical and implied the act had occurred without her consent, as legally, at her age at the time, it had not.
“Yes,” Connie said.
Crandall left the State’s table and walked to the far end of the jury box.
“Young lady,” he said as he arrived, “how about you look at me when you talk.”
She
reluctantly took her eyes off the Defendant and turned to Crandall. The look she gave him was fierce. Not one juror could have missed it.
“And he’s been a good provider?”
“Yes,” she hissed. “The best.”
“And he’s a hard worker”
“Very.”
“And he’s provided for you and your child in every way,” Crandall continued pleasantly.
“Yes.”
“And his father and mother, they’ve provided for him and for you and your child in every way? A place to live? Food to eat?”
“Well, yeah.”
“And if he left you or went away for some reason, they wouldn’t throw you or your baby out?”
The question made her pause and, for once, think before she answered. Her answer proved a theory of mine: You don’t have to be smart to be cunning.
“No,” she said, “not if my guy told them not to.”
“It would be true to say then that you would never say or do anything to hurt or offend your guy,” Crandall said innocently.
“Yes,” Connie said brightly, returning her gaze to her husband. “Yes, that would be true.”
“Because you depend on him and his family for a roof over your head and over your child’s head.”
She had to think again.
“Well, I love him, too.”
Crandall liked the way she said it well enough to let it hang for a moment before he moved on.
Crandall went to the court reporter and asked for the receipt. He looked at it a moment and handed it to Connie.
“Tell the jury the address that’s shown on that receipt,” he said.
“It’s on State Road 6,” Connie said without looking.
“What’s the street name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Read it off the buy slip, as you call it.”
She glanced at the receipt in her hand, then at her husband.
“Is there a street name on that buy slip, young lady?” said Crandall.
She said nothing. She added Reardon and Legs as targets of her distress.
“Is the word ‘cross’ printed on that buy slip?” Crandall asked.
Her eyes welled. Maybe fear or embarrassment dammed up her ducts.
“Can’t read, can you, young lady.”
“Numbers some,” she said.
“Not words,” Crandall said.
She shook her head.
For once, Crandall did not insist she answer aloud, but he didn’t need to. Each juror saw it.
“So,” Crandall said, “when you told the jury this receipt, this buy slip, was for the cross your husband is wearing today, you could not say it was because you read the receipt, true?”
“Marcus said it was.”
Crandall pursed his lips and turned to read the jury. “Did Mr. Reardon really,” he said, still looking at the jury.
“Yes,” she said brightly as though that settled it, but, of course, for Crandall it did not.
“And if I handed you three receipts, you wouldn’t be able to tell which one of the three was for the cross your husband is wearing? Not by yourself. Not without help.”
The question confused her. She looked at hands, as if she expected to find three receipts there.
Again, Crandall did not make her answer aloud. He’d made his point.
Crandall turned to the State’s, his back to Connie. He flipped open the binder to the page he had marked by a pen. He picked up the book, turned, and held it open before him with both hands, like a preacher reading scripture.
“Six crosses,” Crandall said. “Six crosses on chains or necklaces. Isn’t that the number of crosses that were among the gobs of items the police took from your room when they searched it?”
Connie peeled her now anxious stare off her husband’s stone face.
“What?”
“You heard me, young lady. After your husband was arrested, didn’t the police find six crosses in a box in a drawer in the bedroom where you and husband slept?”
Her eyes darted again, searching out Reardon first this time, then Legs, then the Defendant.
“I don’t know how many,” she said with some bite. It seemed she was becoming annoyed with Crandall for asking her questions she did not expect and with the defense for withholding aid.
“More than a handful, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”
“How many’s a handful? Five, six?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did they find more than five, six?”
“Maybe, probably.”
“More than 10?”
“I don’t think so.”
“They all belonged to your husband, did they not?”
“I guess.”
“You guess? If they weren’t his, were they yours?”
“No, I don’t have none of them things.”
“’Them things’? You don’t believe in Jesus?”
“Objection,” Reardon called.
“Mr. Crandall,” Secrist warned.
“So all of the crosses found in your room belonged to your husband, yes or no.”
“Yeah.”
“And how many did he have before the murders?”
“I don’t know.”
“All?”
“I don’t know.”
“Most?”
“I guess.”
“Of the six crosses the police found in your bedroom, five were silver, were they not?”
“I don’t know.”
Crandall extended the binder toward her with both hands and a bowed head, suggesting with that gesture it had the authority of Scripture.
“This is a report of what the police found. Shall I tell you what they say?”
“Objection,” Reardon called.
Crandall shrugged. He wasn’t going to fight about hearsay at that point. He’d just told both Connie and the jury he knew what he was talking about; the jury could rely on the evidence, and Connie better not lie about it.
“Of the crosses the police found in your bedroom, would you agree that more than half of them were silver? Young lady, I’m going to remind you now that you’re under oath to tell the truth, so don’t tell me and this jury you don’t know.”
“Your honor,” Reardon said, rising. “Badgering.”
“Not quite yet, Mr. Reardon,” Secrist said, denying Reardon but warning Crandall.
“Half? Yes or no,” Crandall said.
“I reckon.”
Crandall walked to the defense table and leaned down toward the Defendant, who this time did not flinch. He pointed to the cross on the Defendant’s chest.
“And aren’t those silver crosses that were taken from your bedroom, aren’t they all about the same size as this one?”
She tried to think about it.
“Would you like to look at some photographs of them?” Crandall asked to push her along.
She did not.
“Yeah, probably, more or less,” Connie said, but she had not yet given up. “Maybe.”
“You buy those crosses for your husband?”
“Couple, maybe, yeah.”
“Keep the receipts?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t? I thought you always keep the receipts, the buy slips?”
“I do.”
She looked for a way out of the box.
“It’s just been a long time since I bought them,” she said.
“So you would’ve bought all or nearly all of the crosses we confiscated before the murders occurred.”
“For sure,” she said, looking relieved and clueless that she had climbed out of one hole only to tumble into another.
Crandall had spun Connie like
a top. He’d peppered her with questions and given her little time to think or answer because he figured she was not quick or smart enough to avoid lying. Once the jury decided Connie lied about the crosses, they were unlikely to believe whatever she said about her husband being in bed with her on the night of the murders and more likely to believe that Lotty had identified her assailant.
It was a tactic that came with a risk because it exposed Crandall to the jury for the first time as the mean bastard he frequently is. As Crandall returned to the State’s table, one of the women on the jury who had looked put out with Connie at the end of direct nodded once to herself and one of the men who had looked a little moony glared at Crandall’s back and knotted his jaw.
The corollary to Reardon’s strategy was that if his guy didn’t do it someone else must’ve, so why not give the jury somebody else to think about? For that, he used Pratt.
People who were not cops or lawyers tended to the banal, sometimes with a twist of folksy, when they talked about Walter Pratt. Yeah, Walt was a cop, they said, but he was a good guy, a nice guy. Common, they said, no airs, just common as dirt. He was like your uncle, one of the wits said, the benevolent one with a twinkle, the one who would always listen to you without interruption then give you a white, chalky mint, the size of a horse pill, to gag down when you were done.
Crandall’s opinion of Pratt was different. Outside the jury box, it was well known each hated the other.
In his first career, Pratt had been a detective with the state police, then the head detective at his state police post, then the go-to guy for the entire state. If you were a cop and you had a probe with a problem, you called Pratt.
Walt could figure it out. He could read a witness’s mind. He could make a suspect cry and admit and never raise his voice or hand.
But ten years back—when in his estimation he was at the height of his powers—Pratt tripped on his age. He turned 62, the magic mandatory number for retirement from the state police.
The attitude at the top was: Detecting is a younger man’s game, room must be made for young players, and if you weren’t smart enough to be vested in the pension plan by 62, probably you shouldn’t have been a state cop to begin with.
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