And the Sea Will Tell

by Vincent Bugliosi

  “He’s a peppery judge,” the reporter said.

  “The judge is so bad, it’s unbelievable,” snapped a disgusted Findlay, making no effort to keep his comments off the record. “It’s more than his demeanor. His prejudice against our side goes to substantive issues.”

  I knew that King’s conduct would likely influence the jury against Walker, since it would be a small step for a lay person to reason that a judge who treated the prosecutors with collegial respect and the defense with such disdain must not like the cause the defense attorneys were representing. But Partington and Findlay stuck with their submissive stance, not unlike steers being led to the slaughterhouse.*

  It was obvious that King was like a loose cannon on the bench, unmindful of the prejudicial effect to the defendant his outbursts in court would have on the jury.

  I hadn’t decided how yet, but I already knew I would have to come up with some way to help insure that King acted much differently during Jennifer’s trial. If I had anything to say about it, I wouldn’t even countenance one such outburst, much less the steady stream of them Walker’s attorneys endured.

  FRANK MEHAFFY, a Sacramento, California, college teacher, bland of demeanor and expression, testified he was aboard his boat at Kauai’s Nawiliwili harbor on October 12, 1974, when a ketch he identified as the Sea Wind pulled up to the pier. The next day, he met the couple on the unfamiliar craft—Roy Allen and Jennifer Jenkins.

  Mehaffy was the first prosecution witness to mention a mysterious hole in the hull of the Sea Wind. According to him, Roy Allen explained that a swordfish had speared his boat just below the waterline on the trip from Palmyra.

  Kit, who shook her head in disbelief once or twice during Mehaffy’s story, was convinced that the hole was made by a stray bullet during the brutal murder of her brother and sister-in-law. The prosecutors obviously had the same suspicions and introduced the evidence in order to suggest this scenario to the jurors.

  During a recess, a rangy fellow sitting in front of me turned around to strike up a conversation. An outdoors type in his mid-thirties with a neatly trimmed Vandyke, he said he was a building contractor from Los Angeles.

  “What brings you up for the trial?” I inquired.

  “I’m going to testify.”

  When I explained who I was, he told me he was Joel Peters, “Not the Joel from Ala Wai harbor?” I said quickly.

  “Yeah,” he shrugged.

  “I’ve been looking for you for a long time, Joel. In fact, four years.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  I was not. I asked him to step out into the hallway, where I found Len huddled with Ted Jenkins, mulling over some aspect of the trial. I introduced Peters.

  “This guy right here, Joel—I never knew his last name before now—is one of the key witnesses for Jennifer’s defense,” I said spiritedly, holding on to the surprised contractor’s arm. “I’ve been looking for him ever since Jennifer told me about him. I asked Enoki about someone named Joel, and he said he’d never heard of him. I called all over looking for him.”

  “The FBI called me about a month ago and asked me to testify,” Peters explained. “I guess they’d been looking for me, too. I left Hawaii years ago. Moved to Los Angeles.”

  Len and Ted looked bewildered.

  “Don’t you remember who Joel is?” I asked. “He’s the guy Jennifer delivered the laundry to on the morning of her arrest even though the Coast Guard and FBI were pursuing her. That’s great evidence.”

  Len and Ted both nodded vacantly, obviously not sharing my elation.

  “Wait until the trial,” I promised them. “You’ll see what Joel is going to do for us.”

  Len and Ted both gave me amused if-you-say-so-Vince smiles and resumed their conversation.

  On the stand for the prosecution, Peters testified that he first met Jennifer and Buck on the Big Island in the fall of 1973, then ran into them on Maui early the following year when they were preparing the Iola for launching. In Ala Wai harbor in October 1974, he saw Buck rowing by and hailed him. “Buck pointed out a boat he said was his,” Peters testified, adding that it didn’t look at all like the same boat he had seen Jennifer and Buck refitting in Maalaea Bay. Shown a photo of the Sea Wind, he identified it as the boat.

  The next witness, Katherine Ono, clerked at the Hawaii State Harbors Division. Using Harbors Division documents to refresh her memory, Ono testified that on October 18, 1974, a man named Roy Allen, “a very grubby individual wearing shorts,” filed boat registration forms with her for a “homemade sailboat named the Lokahi,” claiming he had completed it that year. The craft was “an Angleman wooden ketch, thirty-seven and a half feet long by 11.9 feet wide, by 5.7 feet draft from bridge to port, powered by sail and inboard” (the exact description of the Sea Wind), colors “white and violet,” according to Allen’s answers on the form. Ono assigned the boat Hawaii state hull number HA25946C0672.

  Taking the stand dressed in a tight-fitting black skirt and scarlet raw-silk blouse, Sharon Jordan, with her Polynesian looks, deep tan, and straight black waist-length hair, was right out of Mutiny on the Bounty. In her clipped upper-class accent, she testified with poise to finding skeletal remains beside a metal container on the northern shore of the Palmyra lagoon in January 1981.

  Up to now, the horror of what had happened on Palmyra had been deflected by testimony that was relevant to the issue of guilt, but unrelated to the actual acts of atrocity that had taken place. Like a sudden cold sweat, the atmosphere of the trial was changed in an instant by the slow, creaking arrival of a silvery metal box* being wheeled into the courtroom by an FBI agent. There was a sudden silence in the courtroom. The rust-stained container was riddled with holes, some caused by corrosion from the lagoon waters, others by experts conducting evidentiary examinations. The box and lid, Government exhibits 28 and 29, sat squarely before the jury for the first time.

  Everyone’s attention was riveted to the box that, in all likelihood, had for seven years been Muff Graham’s coffin at the bottom of the Palmyra lagoon.

  During cross-examination, Partington worked a line of questioning designed to open the possibility that the bones and box could have washed ashore separately—implying that Muff Graham’s remains had never been inside the container. But Jordan steadfastly and articulately resisted all his attempts to separate the bones from the container, a separation which was vital to Partington if he was to have at least a hint of credibility when he argued to the jury at the conclusion of the case that Muff Graham had not been murdered.

  Partington had considered Jordan so important a witness he had traveled to Johannesburg to interview her. But even with this type of preparation for cross-examining her, he was not able to diminish the impact of several key observations. Jordan’s word picture of Muff Graham’s remains spilling out of the upended container onto the beach was too memorably vivid.

  Jordan: “I found a wristwatch* and small bone inside the lid of the box. The rest of the bones looked like they had fallen out of the box, and were in a crescent shape in the immediate vicinity of the box. I also found a piece of wire near the box, twisted in the shape of the box, that had obviously been around the box at one time, as if to keep the lid on.”

  Partington got into a disagreement with Jordan about what she had told him in South Africa. “Do you recall saying to me that the vegetation was growing in the box in such a way that the box was wedged in and you actually had to hack the vegetation away to get it out?”

  Jordan: “I don’t recall saying that.”

  Partington glowered at the witness. “Do you recall my saying to you that if there was vegetation already growing in the box and wedging the box in, how could the bones have just recently spilled out, as the Government contends? To which you replied you hadn’t thought of that, and the bones couldn’t have just recently spilled out of the box?”

  Jordan: “I don’t recall saying that.”

  After Harry Conklin, a former Coast Guardsman, next testified
to having observed Buck dive into the water at Ala Wai harbor on the morning of October 29, 1974, and escape, FBI agent Henry Burns, the bull-necked twenty-two-year veteran of the Bureau who had arrested Walker on the Big Island in November 1974, gave details of his interview with the prisoner on the drive to Hilo.

  Burns testified to Buck’s telling him about the dinner invitation from the Grahams on August 30, 1974; his and Jennifer’s going to the Sea Wind that night and the Grahams’ absence; the discovery of the overturned dinghy on the beach the following morning; his belief they had died an accidental death, etc.

  Ken White, the missing boat expert whom the prosecution had finally located in Texas, took the stand to tell the jury he’d found no salt water in the Zodiac engine. This was now the third jury to hear that there was no indication at all that Mac and Muff’s dinghy had overturned in the lagoon, thereby knocking another pillar or two out from under the Walker defense team’s accidental-death argument.

  Witness Frank Ballintine, who had sold and serviced Zodiacs for eighteen years, described it as “probably the most stable boat you can find.” He’d heard of only one Zodiac capsizing in the whole of his career, and that had happened in thirty-foot waves forty miles out at sea.

  Next, Calvin Shishido, now retired, testified about his 1974 and 1981 trips to Palmyra.

  Enoki asked the former chief investigator to identify the contents of a large cardboard carton. The jury was now to see the incomplete remains of Muff Graham for the first time. Six plastic bags contained various bones. Out of the carton last came the skull. Shishido identified the lot as the remains he had recovered from the Jordans and subsequently sent to the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.C., for identification and analysis.

  Shishido was next shown a wristwatch. “Do you recognize exhibit 27?” Enoki asked.

  “Yes. Sharon Jordan gave it to me. It was later identified as a lady’s Westclox watch.”

  “That watch has never been positively connected to anybody, has it?” Judge King asked.

  Enoki confirmed that it had not.

  Shishido also identified Buck’s .22-caliber Ruger Bearcat pistol, which he had found aboard the Sea Wind.*

  The Government next called Joseph Stuart, who testified to meeting Buck Walker (introduced to him then as Roy Allen) at a party at his Honolulu home in October 1974.

  Stuart: “He told me he was playing chess with this couple that owned a boat on Palmyra Island…this couple ran out of money and they put up the boat. Whoever won the game would get each other’s boat.”

  Enoki: “According to him, what happened?”

  “He said he won the game and got their nice boat. They got his old boat.”

  “What was the context of this conversation? Was it a joke or what?”

  “He told it as a true story, sir.”

  BESPECTACLED AL Ingman, the next prosecution witness, looked as nervous and ill at ease as a Baptist in a bordello, never once even glancing at his old cellmate, Buck Walker.†

  On direct by Schroeder, Ingman elaborated on the details of Walker’s alleged prison confession at McNeil Island in the spring of 1979: “He mentioned forcing the man to walk the plank.”

  “Did he say what he meant by ‘walk the plank’?”

  “Yes, walk off the edge of the boat.”

  “Did he ever tell you whose boat he used when they made this man walk the plank?”

  “It was my understanding it was the man’s boat, because I believe that Buck and his girlfriend were invited by this couple to dinner.”

  “Did Mr. Walker tell you that this man said anything as he was being made to walk the plank?”

  “He mentioned that the man was crapping all over himself and sniveling when he was being made to walk the plank.”

  “When Mr. Walker told you about this man sniveling and defecating, what was his demeanor?”

  “He was laughing.”

  “Did Mr. Walker ever say that he did, in fact, murder this couple?”

  “There was a statement made about—I don’t recall the term—offing, or knocking them out of the box, or blowing them away, some jailhouse term like that.”

  “Did he mention this term with respect to just the man or with respect to both of them?”

  “I think to both of them, but I’m not sure.”

  If the jury believed Ingman’s testimony, this, of course, was the fall of the blade for Buck.

  Ingman testified that in a motor home in Tijuana, Mexico, at a later date, he asked Walker if he was worried about rumors that his girlfriend might cooperate with the authorities in turning state’s evidence against him, and that Walker “seemed concerned about it, but he didn’t think she would.”

  Ingman went on to testify that shortly after the press reported discovery of “bones in a box on Palmyra,” he’d gone to Mexico to give Walker ten thousand dollars to complete a transaction in their drug-smuggling operation. Walker, Ingman said, had a house in Puerto Escondido, a small fishing village near the southernmost tip of Mexico, and was living with a “younger girl.” He said he told Walker about the accounts of a “box floating up with a woman’s remains in it. I said something about how strange or fantastic it was that a box could come floating up after that much time.”

  “And what did Mr. Walker say?” asked Schroeder.

  “He said that it was bullshit, that he didn’t put her in a box.”

  “Did he say what he did with her body?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  On cross-examination, Partington got Ingman to admit that he was stoned on grass when Walker told the bloody tale in the McNeil prison powerhouse, as well as to share a fact of prison life: “There is a lot of storytelling that goes on in prison, things that aren’t true.”

  Ingman also admitted that he once supported a four-hundred-dollar-a-day habit by dealing drugs, and had supplied heroin to his two sons, one of whom subsequently died of an overdose.

  Partington established Ingman as a “professional witness” by pinning down the amount of Government money he had received over the years for testifying against various individuals—$7,800 before he even entered the federally funded Witness Protection Program, $28,000 afterward. The money, Ingman said, was only to help defray his subsistence, housing, and medical costs.

  “If the Government did not believe you were cooperating with them, you would not have received this money, isn’t that correct?” Partington asked.

  “I suppose so.”

  Richard Taylor, who with his brother Carlos had planned to sail to Palmyra in the fall of 1974 to resupply Buck and Jennifer, came to the stand as a prosecution witness, but the sullen scowl frozen on his long, pinched face left little doubt that he was only reluctantly testifying against his old pal.

  He confirmed that he had received the letter Buck and Jennifer had written on Palmyra. “Buck asked me to bring epoxy,” Taylor said. Asked what it was used for, he replied: “For patching fiberglass.” He recalled that the couple also needed food supplies, “mostly flour and sugar.”

  Why had he and his brother never arrived to rescue their friends? According to Taylor, they had lost their storm jib during a severe blow on a cruise off the Hawaiian Islands.

  He said he next heard from Buck and Jennifer when they reappeared in Oahu. In fact, he visited them on their new boat in Ala Wai harbor on October 27—just two days before the federal dragnet pulled tight on the repainted Sea Wind and her passengers.

  “What did Buck tell you about their new boat?” Schroeder wanted to know.

  Taylor looked as if he’d just swallowed vinegar. “Buck said they were down on Palmyra,” he began uneasily, “and there wasn’t much to do. He had played a lot of chess with a man on the other boat. After a while, the man owed him so much money that they—traded boats.”

  “During this conversation, did he ever mention anyone on Palmyra drowning or capsizing or disappearing?”

  “No, sir, he did not.”

  On cross, Findlay elicited that Taylor had spe
nt three weeks on Palmyra in 1977. When he said he had a “foreboding feeling about the island,” Findlay asked why.

  “It was more than just the fact that it was a ghost-type island,” Taylor said. “It was more than that. It seemed to be an unfriendly place to be. I’ve been on a number of atolls, but Palmyra was different. I can’t put my finger on specifically why. But it was not an island I enjoyed being on. I think other people have had difficulties on that island.” Intended translation: maybe the island itself, not Buck Walker, had mysteriously done Mac and Muff in.

  After establishing that Taylor had owned and operated Zodiac dinghies, Findlay next asked: “From your experience in operating a Zodiac, can you tell us whether it is possible for someone to be thrown from a Zodiac; for example, in a situation where a sharp turn is made?”

  “Absolutely.” Taylor brightened, as if this was just the kind of question he had been waiting to hear. “In fact, we had to rig our own Zodiac with safety lines, because there is really nothing to hold on to.”

  Buck Walker still had some friends in the world.

  CHAPTER 27

  THE JURY WOULD NOW hear testimony on the key issue at the Walker trial. To prove that Muff Graham had been murdered, thus refuting the defense’s main argument that she had died accidentally when the Zodiac overturned in the lagoon, the Government called to the stand a platoon of medical and scientific expert witnesses. Their often complex and abstruse testimony would consume hundreds of pages of transcript.

  Dr. Oliver Harris, a forensic odontologist (a specialist in the study of teeth and their surrounding tissue) with a sparse, balding crown and reading glasses that he kept putting on and taking off, testified to his examination of the skull and its mandible, or lower jawbone, which was detached (“fractured out by blunt trauma”) from the skull when found on Palmyra. He cited other evidence of blunt trauma: fractures to an upper left molar in Muff’s skull and a lower right molar in the jawbone, as well as to the crown of tooth number 13 at the gumline and the apices (tips) of the roots of tooth number 30. There were also “fracture lines” in the lower jaw. He asserted that these fractures most probably occurred either pari mortem (at or near the time of death) or postmortem (after death).