And the Sea Will Tell

by Vincent Bugliosi

  I summarized the testimony of defense witness Rick Schulze, the Hawaii lawyer who had described Walker as “rough and coarse…paranoid and defensive, and fascinated with weapons.” And I reminded the jury that Debbie Noland had testified that Buck had a “firecracker” personality, an explosive and violent temper.

  “Mrs. Leonard testified how Buck would row his boat slowly past her boat, and look at her with very hard eyes. She would talk to him, and he wouldn’t answer. And she was very afraid of him. Tom Wolfe also said Buck was a scary guy.

  “Stop to think about it. How many people have you personally met in your life who were actually scary to you, whom you were afraid of?

  “Buck gave every indication of being the precise type of individual who would engage in violent crimes. And we know these indications were accurate ones because Buck Walker, long before he ever set foot on the coral reef of Palmyra, had already been convicted of two armed robberies.”

  I pointed out to the jury that robbery, of course, is a violent crime, the taking of personal property from the person or immediate presence of another by means of force or fear, such as by a gun or knife, then pressed on with my “prosecution” of Buck Walker: “I submit that it takes a particular type of individual, one whose moral senses are coarse, one who has pronounced antisocial proclivities, to commit an act such as armed robbery.”

  Because of Walker’s two prior robbery convictions, I told the jury, “we have proof positive, not foundationless speculation, that Buck Walker had the instincts coursing through his veins to resort to violence to get what he wanted. And the Grahams had something Buck Walker wanted, the Sea Wind.

  “This was simply, ladies and gentlemen, a very brutal murder committed alone by a cold-blooded human being named Buck Walker for the purpose of acquiring one of the most magnificent boats that anyone has ever seen.”

  I NEXT DREW bead on what I called the “very core” of the prosecution’s case. “Simple arithmetic is all they really have. Four people on an island, two end up dead, and the other two end up with their boat, acting suspiciously. These two must both be guilty, because four minus two leaves two. Basic, simple arithmetic. One of the two, Buck Walker, has already been found guilty. Jennifer is the remaining one, they say.

  “In the remainder of my argument to you, I’m not only going to be talking about the evidence in this case, evidence that points irresistibly to Buck Walker’s guilt and Jennifer’s innocence, I’m also going to be talking about life. Not life as we would perhaps like it to be, but life as it is.”

  Though it had not come from the witness stand, from the very beginning I knew that human nature would be a part of the evidence in the case I would argue to the jury.

  “Some of you, at this juncture, might be saying to yourself: ‘Mr. Bugliosi, you’re saying that Jennifer Jenkins is a warmhearted, compassionate human being, but you say that Buck Walker is a vicious, cold-blooded robber and murderer. Isn’t this somewhat of a contradiction? Because if what you say is true, why would she be with him? Just as water seeks its own level, don’t people tend to seek their own kind? The so-called birds-of-a-feather syndrome?’”

  Enoki had made the same point. “What was she doing with him if she was not…like him?”

  “That type of question necessarily implies that things in life fall into a predictable pattern. That life proceeds in apple-pie order. But, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you know as well as I that that’s not the way life is. Life is an endless series of inconsistencies, a bewildering mixture of contradictions, where the only thing stranger than fiction is reality.

  “For whatever reason, Jennifer loved Buck Walker. Rick Schulze said she saw a spark of goodness in Buck. Jennifer herself testified that though she knew Buck had a bad background, she felt he had a lot of potential and felt she could help him.

  “And don’t forget that by the time Jennifer found out that Buck Walker had been convicted of robbery, she had already fallen in love with him and started living with him. By that time, she probably had lost the capacity to see Buck Walker for who he really was. Jerome Kern’s ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ is not just a ballad to dance to, it tells us a lot about life.

  “Undoubtedly, most people would not approve of a nice girl loving a guy like Buck Walker. But we don’t get to approve of whom people love, do we? We cannot hold it against Jennifer for loving Buck Walker. And, above all, we certainly cannot say that because she was with him, and because she loved him, that it’s likely she is also like him. That is, that she is also a murderer.

  “As an extreme example of what I’m talking about—sometimes extreme examples are good to underscore a point—I’m going to give you a historical one you’re familiar with. My example might sound farfetched, but it’s relevant because Mr. Enoki’s point is that if Buck Walker was vicious and violent, and Jennifer was with him, she was the same type.

  “Let me transport you for a moment to the Second World War. While the furnaces were blazing in places like Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Chelmno, the malodorous smell of burning human flesh permeating the countryside, Adolf Hitler, in the rarefied atmosphere of Berchtesgaden high in the Bavarian Alps, was spending pleasurable moments with the woman in his life, Eva Braun.

  “Though Hitler was one of the most satanic men ever to walk the face of this earth, though his monstrous crimes are beyond human calculation—over forty years after his death we’re still cleaning up the debris of his Third Reich—Eva Braun apparently loved Adolf Hitler, eventually electing to die with him in that besieged Berlin bunker in April of 1945, rather than escape to safety. Apparently, Eva Braun saw something human in the inhuman Adolf Hitler. Though Eva Braun loved, and on the last day of her life married, Adolf Hitler, whose crimes were of biblical proportions, did that make her the same type of person he was? No historian of this period has even remotely hinted at this, or at her complicity in the horrors of the Third Reich. By virtually all accounts she was a rather uncomplicated, fluffy-headed but decent Bavarian girl of simple tastes.

  “If you can conceive of Eva Braun—now, granted, this is an extreme example, but it illustrates the point—if you can conceive of Eva Braun, the woman in Adolf Hitler’s life, not being like him, why should you have any difficulty whatsoever conceiving of Jennifer Jenkins, the woman in Buck Walker’s life, not being like him at all? Not being capable, like him, of murder?”

  For whatever reason, I explained, Jennifer was in love with Buck Walker. “And when you love someone, you do things for that person. Isn’t that what love is all about? Do you do anything, anything at all for the person you love? Well, if you have absolutely no moral fiber you do. You do anything they ask you to do. We know that’s not the situation with Jennifer, as it’s not the situation, fortunately, with most people. But I’ll tell you one thing most people will do for their loved ones, and that is protect them when they’ve done something wrong.”

  I asked the jury to look at the situation from Jennifer’s perspective in the summer of 1974. Why had she and Buck gone to Palmyra in the first place? So Buck could not only escape punishment on the MDA conviction, but, more importantly, avoid being sent back to San Quentin on a violation of his robbery parole.

  “He told Jennifer he was terrified of San Quentin, vowing he would never go back. These are the things that were uppermost in Jennifer’s mind in the summer of 1974. She loved Buck, and when he told her of his terror of being sent back to San Quentin, what effect do you think that had on her? Well, she told you what effect it had.

  “Virtually everything that Jennifer did in this case is traceable to two realities. Number one, that she loved Buck Walker, and number two, she was trying to protect him from apprehension. If you keep these two realities in mind, I say that her conduct will be much more understandable to you.”

  I added that it was “exceedingly common” for decent, honorable, law-abiding people even to commit crimes to protect a loved one who has gone wrong. “In this case here, Jennifer considered herself Buck Walker’s commo
n-law wife. She has never married. Buck was the closest to a husband she has ever had.”

  As an example of protecting one’s loved ones, I asked the jury: “How many times do parents permit their fugitive sons to hide out at home from the authorities, thereby committing the crime of being an accessory after the fact to the crime their son committed?

  “In fact, some European nations, by statute, specifically exclude family members from prosecution for harboring a criminal or assisting them in evading apprehension by the law.

  “For instance, the family of Dr. Joseph Mengele—you remember him, the notorious Nazi ‘Angel of Death’ who was responsible for the extermination of about four hundred thousand people, mostly Jews, in Poland during the Second World War—they helped him avoid apprehension from the law for thirty years, and the authorities knew this. The family even later admitted it. But West German law protected them from being prosecuted.

  “Just like, as they say, you cannot legislate morality, all the laws in the world cannot tear asunder the bond of blood and love that unites human beings to one another. These relationships, of course, are the protoplasm, as it were, of all human existence, without which there would be no laws, without which there would be no civilized society as we know it today.

  “What I am saying is that there are laws other than those written in the law books. Laws, emotions, and feelings as indestructible and imperishable as human nature itself, and which no system of jurisprudence has ever yet been able to ignore.

  “Can Mr. Enoki come back and say in his rebuttal that I am saying that in defense of your loved ones it’s okay to commit any crime you want? Well, he can say it, but I’m not saying it.

  “A parent or spouse of a robber, for instance, might permit him to hide out in their home, but they’re not going to go out and commit a robbery or a murder for him. People do things for their loved ones, but they draw lines in the sand. There are limits.

  “Lest Mr. Enoki suggest in his rebuttal that since Jennifer loved Buck Walker, and since he was the dominant party in their relationship, he could get Jennifer to go along with him in his plan to murder the Grahams, let me point out that Jennifer Jenkins did draw lines in the sand with Buck Walker. True, she testified that she never wanted to create waves with Buck, so she normally let him have his way. But only up to a point. There were limits.”

  I recalled Jennifer’s opposition to having guns in the cabin at Mountain View, and Buck’s removing them. I also reminded the jurors of the spaghetti-on-the-wall incident—“Maybe it’s a trifle, but it’s nonetheless illuminating. Although Buck threw the spaghetti on the wall, he wanted her to clean it up. She said, ‘You did it. You clean it up.’ And he did.

  “On Palmyra, Buck wanted Jennifer to live in his tent with him. She said no, and she did not move to the tent. After they returned to Hawaii, he wanted her to put her name on those registration papers for the Sea Wind. She said no, and she did not do it. His name alone appears on those registration papers.

  “If Buck Walker couldn’t talk Jennifer into letting him keep guns in their home in Mountain View, if he couldn’t talk her into living with him in his tent on Palmyra, if he couldn’t talk her into putting her name on those boat registration papers, if he couldn’t even talk her into cleaning spaghetti from the wall of the cabin, how in the world could he talk her into committing two of the most horrendous, brutal, gruesome murders imaginable?”

  Allowing this idea to sink in, I paused, sipping from a cup filled with a honey-and-lemon concoction that helps sustain my voice during lengthy summations.

  “But Jennifer was willing to help Buck avoid being apprehended and sent to prison. She was willing to protect him, which is one of the most natural instincts toward one you love.”

  I argued that she was continuing to protect Buck right through Shishido’s interrogation. “She volunteered virtually everything that happened on Palmyra, but she did not tell him that Roy Allen was Buck Walker, the fugitive. This she did not volunteer to him. In fact, Shishido recalls that the only area where she specifically refused to answer questions was concerning Roy Allen.

  “She even took affirmative steps to prevent him from learning that Roy Allen was Buck Walker,” I said, reminding the jury that to keep the authorities from learning Buck’s identity, Jennifer had given Shishido the incorrect date and location she and Buck were first on the Iola.

  “So right to the very end, she was protecting and covering up for Buck Walker. Not covering up, in her mind, for his being a murderer, but for his being a fugitive from justice on the federal drug charge.”

  I walked over and stood behind Jennifer at the defense table, placing my right hand on her shoulder. “I say that Jennifer Jenkins is here right now in this courtroom because she loved and wanted to protect Buck Walker, and for no other reason.

  “The prosecution has taken the acts and statements of Jennifer Jenkins resulting from her desire to protect Buck Walker, and tried to convert them into evidence of her guilt for the murder of Muff Graham. I have every confidence that you folks are not going to let them get by with it.

  “Let me ask you this question,” I continued, returning to the podium. “If your daughter, or sister, or any young woman you know well, had been in Jennifer’s shoes—by that I mean, number one, she’s by herself with a fugitive from justice on an almost deserted Pacific island, and also later when they return to Hawaii, and number two, she’s in love with this man—if they acted just like Jennifer acted in this case, would you be terribly shocked? To the point where you would say, ‘Well, as much as I don’t want to believe it, she must have been involved in the murders’?

  “Now, in asking yourself that question, don’t embroider your consideration with the observation that your daughter, or sister, or friend would never have gotten involved with this scoundrel Buck Walker in the first place. Remember, we’re talking about life as it is, not life as we would like it to be. Human beings, for whatever reason, often become intimately involved with others who have a background and character completely different from theirs. We know this.”

  I argued all these points before I got into the key day of August 30, 1974, needing the jury to be much more inclined to believe Jennifer’s version of what took place on this day.

  “NOW, LET’S try to reconstruct, as best we can, what happened on that tragic day of August 30, 1974. The first question that presents itself, the way I view the evidence, is whether there was in fact a dinner invitation.”

  I argued it was obvious there was not. For openers, I said, Mac’s supposedly telling Buck that if he and Muff weren’t back by 6:30 P.M. Buck and Jennifer should come aboard the Sea Wind and make themselves at home, made the invitation unbelievable. The Grahams, of course, wouldn’t even let their closest friends come aboard the Sea Wind in their absence.

  “But how was Jennifer supposed to have known this particular fact about the Grahams?” I argued. “The prosecution presented no evidence that Jennifer would have had any reason to know this.”

  Enoki’s position was that the relationship between the Grahams and Buck and Jennifer was very poor. Therefore, this increased the likelihood that there was no dinner invitation, and Jennifer would have known this. “But was the relationship really that bad?” I now asked. “We’re going to have to examine this very closely now, because this is a key issue. The evidence that came from that witness stand simply did not establish that the relationship was that bad.”

  I told the jury that even the strongest testimony the prosecution offered to prove this important point was somewhat ambiguous and contradictory. With respect to Tom Wolfe’s testimony that Jennifer told him both couples, coming to Palmyra expecting to be alone, were irritated with each other, each feeling the other had invaded their privacy, I told the jury that Wolfe may have misconstrued what Jennifer told him. “Jennifer testified she did tell Wolfe that the Grahams and she and Buck each had come to Palmyra wanting to be alone, and the Grahams probably still felt that way. But as Jennifer testifie
d, she and Buck no longer did, because as it turned out, the Grahams ended up being very helpful to her and Buck.”

  I went on to point out a seeming contradiction in Wolfe’s testimony: If, as Wolfe said, he was under the impression that the two couples weren’t getting along very well and weren’t really talking to each other, how, I asked the jury, “do you reconcile that with this testimony by Wolfe on my cross-examination of him?

  “‘Question: You were aware that on occasion Mac Graham would bring some of the fish he and Muff caught over to Buck and Jennifer, is that correct? Answer: That’s correct.’

  “If they weren’t talking to each other,” I asked the jury, “what would Mac do when he would bring fish over to them? Drive his Zodiac past the Iola and lob the fish onto the deck of their boat? Moreover, if Party A is not getting along with Party B, does Party A, on his own, bring fish to Party B?”

  Wolfe’s testimony, I told the jury, did not appear to be clear-cut in its negative import.

  “So what was the relationship between the Grahams and Buck and Jennifer? Well, although the Grahams came to Palmyra expecting it to be uninhabited, they may not have minded people visiting the island for short periods. But they most likely did not want people who, like Buck and Jennifer, intended to stay there for a long time, the same as they.”

  There were two other factors involved, I added. The Grahams being decent people, it probably put pressure on them and made them uncomfortable to have Buck and Jennifer not doing well when they themselves were living nearby in relative luxury.

  “We also know that Mac and Muff were conservative, middle-of-the-road Americans, and Buck and Jennifer were leading a somewhat unconventional life-style. And we naturally tend to be more distant towards people whose life-style is different from ours. But other than Curt Shoemaker’s very questionable testimony about a truce, there certainly was no evidence from that witness stand that there was anything rising to the level of a feud or bad blood between them. In fact, there is substantial evidence to the contrary.