Blind Faith

by Joe McGinniss

  By the time of trial, in January of 1986, the Marshall case had become the quintessential symbol of the consequences of a lifestyle that so many in Toms River had espoused if not embraced, or embraced if not espoused.

  As such, it provided a graphic illustration of how fragile was the crust above the fault line, especially for married women in their forties.

  “Maria,” the native wrote, “was a person who only showed a certain side to the world: The Perfect Suburban Wife. Not only does she cancel herself out if she leaves, throws out, or in any other way terminates the marriage, she wouldn’t be doing it because she’s in love with someone else or she’s been offered a vice presidency with W. R. Grace Co.; she’d be the forsaken wife. A forty-two-year-old has-been in a job where there’s no thanks, no raises, and no promotions anyhow. Her life has been the house, Rob, the kids.”

  And then, of course, there was Felice.

  “In her yearbook,” the native wrote, “it says she wanted to be a lawyer. The staff chose ‘nightclub entertainer.’ They were pretty close. Picture Rob O.—the Superprep—he’s so OP’ed he dreams in apple green and pink. When he finally ‘falls in love’ with one of his many mates, [she turns out to be] bespangled, wiry-haired, loudmouthed, ‘obnoxious’ [and] disreputable. She came to Toms River when we were in the eighth grade, a bunch of kids out of tar-paper shacks and kerosene lamps by half a generation…”

  And, the implication was, the town had never recovered.

  Felice herself, on the other hand, seemed to have rebounded quite nicely by the time of trial. True, she had resigned her job at Seaview Regional, but she’d opened her own video store and was already thinking of expanding, and she and David had reconciled and were living together in the condo at the beach.

  Those who called by telephone received a prerecorded message, in which Felice and David delivered alternate lines.

  “This is Felice.”

  “And this is Dave.”

  “And we’re trying…”

  “Hard to be brave.”

  “We’re out and about…”

  “Doing our thing.”

  “Sorry we missed your…”

  “Ringy-ding-ding.”

  Then, at the end, they both giggled.

  * * *

  For Rob Marshall’s sons, however, the mood upon the eve of trial was somewhat less festive.

  Roby had returned to Villanova shortly after his father’s arrest and had successfully completed the spring semester. He’d spent the summer as a lifeguard at Ortley Beach and had returned again to Villanova in the fall.

  Chris had stayed on at Lehigh, where he was compiling an outstanding record both academically and with the swimming team. He had worked the previous summer as a lifeguard at the country club pool, which put him directly in the line of sight (and within earshot) of those Toms River residents most addicted to gossiping about the case. He had taken the job, he’d said, just to prove that he didn’t have anything to be ashamed of.

  John had completed eighth grade successfully and had entered Toms River East in the fall. He was living at the house on Crest Ridge Drive, under the supervision of his father’s mother’s friend Tessie McBride, who had moved in just after his father’s arrest to take charge of running the family.

  Over the year that had passed since Rob’s arrest, the two older boys had grown, if not estranged, certainly more aloof from one another.

  Roby felt that Chris was not supporting their father openly or vocally enough.

  Chris, on the other hand, despite his doubts, had visited and written to his father far more often than had Roby, and grew annoyed when his family loyalty was questioned, just as he was irritated by the thought of Roby being blindly led about by Tessie McBride instead of thinking matters through on his own.

  And about Tessie McBride, there was no doubt: she was an absolutist. Absolute loyalty to Rob. Absolute scorn and contempt for the prosecutor’s office. And absolute insistence that anyone who wanted to continue as a friend of the family proclaim the same absolute belief that Rob was innocent and that he would ultimately be vindicated.

  This meant that there hadn’t been much traffic through the house in recent months. The boys, under Tessie McBride’s dominion, had become isolated from the friends and neighbors who’d been so quick to extend sympathy in the first weeks after Maria’s murder. Even Sal Coccaro—Uncle Sal—who, like everyone else in town, had come to view Rob’s guilt as undeniable, was no longer welcome at the house.

  “People are too quick to judge,” Roby said, during a conversation with an acquaintance who had asked him about his views. “I was at lunch with them that day, at the country club. Don’t you think that if you were planning something like that you’d be a little shaky? But it was just a normal lunch. It was like the perfect afternoon with my parents. It was what I was used to for eighteen, nineteen years.

  “The lack of allegiance is what bugs me,” he said. “My dad’s done everything for this town—the United Way, everything. And now they just turn away from him. They just don’t know him. You’d have to have lived with him to know the kind of person he is, and I’ve lived with him all my life.

  “The thing is, my dad was honest with us right from the start, as soon as this happened. He told us everything. Everything. So now we’re never going to let him think we’re going to doubt him. We’re always going to let him know that we’re going to stand behind him right to the end.

  “And I think everything’s going to be okay. There’s a lot of positive energy and I just don’t think it can go any other way. There’s always a chance, I know there’s a chance, but I just don’t think of it. It’s always in the back of my mind, like a movie—‘what if this happens’—but then I always just stop it. I never let it go until the end. I just don’t think of the bad things.

  “You know,” he said, “at the time my mom died we had everything you could ever imagine. And now we have nothing. We’ve gone from riches to rags. Literally. But I don’t think God would put us through this much bullshit if it weren’t going to be okay in the end.”

  Chris Marshall was not quite so optimistic about the outcome. He had decided, however, not to share his feelings with his father.

  “He thinks that we’re behind him a hundred percent and thus that we’re a hundred percent sure he’s going to be found innocent and life’s going to continue the right way. He needs to think that in order to have something to live for,” Chris said.

  “Sure, I want to tell him how much I miss Mom so he knows it and knows how much I’m hurting—that it’s not just him that’s hurting. I don’t think he realizes that enough. I want to tell him how John is hurting, too, but in the situation we’re in it’s better that he doesn’t know, because it would just give him one more thing to worry about.

  “I’ve never said, ‘What if you’re found guilty, Dad? What’s going to happen to us?’ because that would terrify him, I think, and I don’t want to upset him anymore. Right now, he needs support. I’m not putting on an act. I’m just doing what I feel is right.

  “I tell him that I love him, but—it’s not a lie, I do love him—but it seems it’s a kind of…temporary clause. That if he was involved, I’m not going to love him. But that’s, you know—I don’t know. It’s just so confusing.

  “It feels like there’s this high-pressure thing that’s inside me that I’m just trying to keep contained as best I can. It’s like a burning feeling—no, that’s not right. It’s just—there’s something there that I have to keep—either keep in until it’s over, or just keep in, period. My only release, really, is nights where I’ll just sit there and cry and just feel sorry for myself because I don’t have my mother.

  “I just want…peace in my mind. One way or the other. That he did or he didn’t. I don’t want there to have to be a question mark left. I want to know for sure, either way. Either hate him or love him, I guess.

  “The hardest thing would be if there was a technicality and he was released and I wasn’t
sure. I don’t know if I could hug him, tell him that I was glad he was back. I don’t know if I could do that. And not know, for the rest of his life, whether or not I should go visit him for Christmas.

  “Either way, I want it to be the facts. I don’t want it to be some technicality. For me, that would be the worst.”

  Carl Seely, however, prior to trial, was attempting to have the case against Rob dismissed on just the sort of “technicality” that Chris feared.

  Seely argued that the tape Rob had made for Gene Leahy was, first of all, a legally privileged communication between client and attorney and therefore not something the state was entitled to make use of. Second, he said, investigation by Gary Hamilton at the Best Western had shown that Rob had actually placed the envelope containing the tape inside a closed wooden mail receptacle in the lobby and that the retrieval of it by Detective Vandermeer was improper.

  Not only should the contents of the tape not be permitted as evidence at trial, Seely argued, but to the extent that Rob’s words on the tape had induced Ferlin L’Heureux to cooperate with the state, the entire indictment—based as it was, in large part, upon L’Heureux’s testimony before the grand jury—should be dismissed.

  Roby Marshall professed to be elated by this possibility. Chris was not.

  “They had no right, Chris,” Roby said by telephone from Villanova, where he had reenrolled. “Mr. Seely is going to prove that they had no right to take that tape in the first place, which means they never even had the right to arrest Dad, which means they’re going to have to let him go.”

  “But don’t you see, Roby?” Chris said from Lehigh. “Don’t you see how that misses the point? That doesn’t do a thing to prove that Dad’s innocent.”

  “This is America, Chris, in case you’ve forgotten. A man doesn’t have to prove he’s innocent. The state has to prove that he’s guilty.”

  “Not when it’s Dad you’re talking about. And not when it’s Mom who’s dead.”

  “Oh, Chris, come off the soapbox. Mr. Seely says this is the best chance we have.”

  “Then Mr. Seely must think Dad’s guilty, too.”

  “No, Chris. I don’t think so. Some of us have a little more faith.”

  “Yeah, you and Tessie McBride and Mr. Seely. Whoop-de-doo.”

  “You know, Chris, you can really be a pain in the ass. Here’s a chance to get this whole thing blown out of the water and get Dad back home where he belongs and instead of being happy about it you’re acting as if it’s some sort of dirty trick.”

  “Look, I’m not arguing with Mr. Seely. His job is to get Dad off any way he can. But I’m looking at it a little differently. What I want to know is whether or not Dad hired L’Heureux and Dew to kill Mom. And all this bullshit about a tape in a mailbox has nothing to do with that.”

  “Yeah, but don’t you see, if they illegally seized it, then L’Heureux’s whole statement gets thrown out.”

  “So what? It gets thrown out. That doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

  “You know, Chris, sometimes I really wonder whose side you’re on.”

  “Well, then, I’ll tell you, Roby. So you’ll never have to wonder again. I’m on Mom’s side.”

  Seely lost his legal argument about the tape, but he had won an earlier motion for change of venue, on the basis of extensive pretrial publicity (much of which had been generated by himself).

  The case was moved to Atlantic County, one county south, and would be tried in Mays Landing, the county seat, a nondescript village twelve miles inland from Atlantic City. The shift had at least three significant effects.

  First, it meant that Rob would not be tried before a jury composed of people who had already decided he was guilty.

  Second (and this was sorely vexing to many), it meant that anyone from the country club who wanted to take in the spectacle would have to drive for an hour to get there—which might look tacky—instead of being able to “just drop by” almost as if by accident, as they could have done if the trial had been held in Toms River.

  Third, it meant that the presiding judge would be, instead of a member of the Toms River Country Club, Manuel H. Greenberg of Atlantic County Superior Court. Judge Greenberg was a short, trim, white-haired man in his midfifties who, in his fourteen years on the bench, had compiled the best record of any judge in the state in terms of how rarely his rulings were reversed by higher courts.

  There was also a fourth, and somewhat ironic, effect: the jury would be composed of Atlantic County residents. What made this ironic was that Atlantic City was in Atlantic County, which meant that approximately half the citizens summoned for jury duty would be employed by a gambling casino.

  Three casino employees eventually wound up on the jury. And one of them—in fact, she became the forewoman—was actually a blackjack dealer from Harrah’s Marina. There to deal Rob his ultimate hand.

  Rob and Ricky Dew were being tried together. Charges against Grandshaw had earlier been dismissed, and Myers—because his alleged involvement was not such that it could warrant the death penalty—would be tried separately, at a later date.

  To try the case the county prosecutor had selected the most aggressive, experienced and loyal of his assistants, a thirty-nine-year-old Bricktown lawyer named Kevin Kelly.

  Kelly had grown up in Newark. His high school was St. Benedict’s, one of those old inner-city Catholic schools where corporal punishment was considered an integral part of the educational process.

  Summers, he worked as a garbage collector for the City of Newark. Life among the flies and rats and stench of South Orange Avenue, with the clank of the big cans hitting the shimmering pavement and the sweet taste of Ripple from a brown paper bag at nine o’clock in the morning. There was a rumor that another white kid worked sanitation for Newark also, but if he did, Kelly never met him.

  Kelly’s marks weren’t much at St. Benedict’s, but he had developed that tough skin and can-do attitude the Benedictines approved of, and they sent him on to one of their colleges—St. Bernard’s (now defunct) in Cullman, Alabama. After graduating from there, Kelly went to Cumberland Law School in Tennessee and then came back north to take the New Jersey bar exam.

  While waiting, he taught seventh grade at Broadway Junior High School in Newark, which showed him that being a garbage collector wasn’t the worst job in the world, or even in Newark.

  After passing the bar, he went to work for Joe Lordi, the prosecutor in Essex County, which included Newark. He stuck it out there for four years, doing homicides mostly, so many of them coming so fast that often his first look at a case file was when he was riding the elevator up to the courtroom to try it.

  He was good at the job: not a brilliant lawyer but a workhorse, and in the Essex County prosecutor’s office, endurance counted for far more than genius. His days as a garbageman helped, too. More than once, at that point near the start of a trial when the judge would ask prospective jurors whether they were personally acquainted with any of the principals, a deep, black voice would rumble forth, “That Mr. Kelly standin’ there. Him ’n’ me was trashmen together.” Kelly didn’t lose many cases.

  It got to him, though, the pace and the gruesomeness. Especially during the period of intramural warfare among various Black Muslim sects, when headless corpses (and corpseless heads) began piling up in basements and stairwells all over town. When he found himself bringing some of the photos along to show to young women he was dating, Kelly knew it was time to get out.

  His father, like almost every other white man in North Jersey, had acquired a small summer place down at the shore. In this case, Bricktown, that vague agglomeration of sand and scrub and rusted-out cars that had existed unnoticed for years just north of Toms River and then, in the boom years, had suddenly become a giant parking lot.

  Kelly’s father died in 1975 and Kelly converted the Bricktown summerhouse into an all-weather home and found himself a job as a part-time assistant prosecutor in Ocean County.

  In conjunction with an
other part-time assistant, and with a great deal of assistance from the prosecutor himself (in Ocean County all assistant prosecutors were part-time, devoting one-third of their hours to the prosecutor’s office and the remainder to their private practices), Kelly opened his own office right on Brick Boulevard, specializing in real estate closings.

  Not long afterward, he had a visit from Rob Marshall. Rob, apparently, had worked a deal with the local bar association by which they would tip him off whenever a new lawyer moved into the area, so Rob could get there first, offering life insurance, mutual funds and retirement plans.

  He swung by one day at about noon, picking Kelly up in a Mercedes. But that was where the opulence ended. Rob took them to a nearby restaurant named Mr. Steak (in fairness, Bricktown was not big on opulence), and even before the menus had arrived, he had his briefcase open on the table.

  “None of the niceties,” Kelly recalled. “No ‘Where are you from? How do you like it here? Someday, let’s take a ride in my boat.’ None of that kind of shit. Just bang-bang, straight to business. And once he’d signed me up—I don’t know what it was, some goddamned thing, some mutual fund where I’d send in fifty or a hundred bucks a month—once that was over, it was, slam! Snap the briefcase, get the check, sign that Amex slip and out the door. I still have half my fucking hamburger on my plate and he’s out in the parking lot with the engine running. The guy could fit in three or four lunches a day, the way he hustled.”

  Kelly had brought his Newark personality with him to Ocean County. He walked into a courtroom as if he were ready to sling a City of Newark trash can across it. He went after defendants the way the Benedictines had gone after him (except he stopped short of whipping them with a strap). He was, in short, a tough kid from the city ready to kick ass down at the shore. And nothing galled him more than to see these rinky-dinks waltzing around a nowhere town like Toms River flaunting what appeared to be pretensions.