Blind Faith

by Joe McGinniss

  “I think you were there,” Baird said, “I think you were there and you shot that lady to death. Isn’t that what you did?”

  “No.”

  “Just think for a second,” Baird continued, “about something you said yesterday. You said, ‘I will never forget her sitting there holding the rose,’ and you made a gesture of the lady holding it at about the middle of her chest. A beautiful picture of a beautiful lady, was it not?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And the reason you will never forget it is because of the way it contrasts in your mind—that peacefulness, that beauty, that serenity—with the violence that you saw done to that body in the car as you shot it. And that’s the reason you will never, ever forget that, isn’t it?”

  “My part of that,” L’Heureux admitted.

  “The only reason you won’t forget is that just as we in life see something beautiful and then see it destroyed, you saw something beautiful and you were a party to its destruction, too, weren’t you?”

  “I was a party to it,” L’Heureux said.

  “As a matter of fact, you were the party to it: your gun, your rubber gloves and your car.”

  “That’s true, it was my gun. I had purchased the rubber gloves. But I did not shoot Maria Marshall.”

  “Sir,” Baird said. “I’m telling you that the state had a good case against you, and the reason they had such a good case against you was because you were the shooter, and you put Ricky Dew as the shooter because you knew that as long as you were the shooter you couldn’t make a deal.”

  “They had no case on me as the shooter,” L’Heureux said.

  “They have no case against Ricky Dew as the shooter either,” Baird said, “except you.”

  The next morning, as Rob Marshall was led into court by the sheriff’s deputies who transported him from his jail cell each day, he spotted his son John and gave a big grin. Then he held up the folder in which he carried his paperwork back and forth from courtroom to jail cell each day. On the side of the folder, he’d printed the words I LOVE YOU in purple Magic Marker.

  A photographer from the Asbury Park Press took a picture. John looked embarrassed. Rob looked very pleased with himself.

  Baird kept L’Heureux on the stand for two more days. Occasionally, he employed ridicule to make L’Heureux’s story (in regard to Dew, at least) seem less believable.

  “Now tell me about these gloves,” he said. “You say they were the kind that you use to wash dishes. That is not personal knowledge on your part, is it?”

  “I have washed a few,” L’Heureux said.

  “Okay. Do they come in sizes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What size did you buy?”

  “I asked the girl there.”

  “What did you say, ‘I got a fellow, Dew, out there in the car and I want a pair of gloves that will fit him?’”

  “No, I just bought a pair of gloves. I was looking for a pair of rubber gloves and I bought a pair of gloves.”

  Later, Baird asked L’Heureux about the hours that followed the murder.

  “You went to bed at two o’clock?”

  “Yes, about then.”

  “And you slept until six o’clock?”

  “Well, I didn’t do much sleeping, but I slept.”

  “You didn’t do much sleeping? Do you mean you were still troubled by this experience?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Or do you mean you were in the process of fornicating?”

  “In the process of doing what?”

  “Fornicating,” Baird said. “You know what that means, don’t you.”

  “No, sir.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Oh, I know what that means, but no, sir, I wasn’t.”

  “Didn’t you say in your statement that after this happened you went out and picked up a couple of prostitutes and brought them back to the motel and had sex with them and then went to bed?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, now, was the problem that interfered with your sleeping being with a woman or being upset about the crime?”

  “Being upset about the crime.”

  “Did that spoil the pleasure of being with a woman for you?”

  “It wasn’t my desires,” L’Heureux said.

  “Oh, she forced herself on you?”

  “No, sir.”

  At this point, Kelly objected, but Baird had already made the point he’d wanted to, and one he would come back to in closing argument: that according to L’Heureux’s story there were at least two eyewitnesses, the prostitutes, who could have placed Ricky Dew in New Jersey at the time of the murder, but the state had not been able to produce them.

  Although he made L’Heureux’s motive to lie a constant theme, and continued to criticize the entire plea-bargain arrangement, Baird’s closest scrutiny was reserved for that portion of L’Heureux’s original statement in which he had first implicated Dew.

  “Let me suggest something to you,” Baird said. “And that is that the story that on the way home in July you told Greene about Marshall wanting his wife killed is an integral and necessary part of your entire statement. Because when you concocted the idea that Ricky Dew was going to be identified as the shooter, you had to somehow bridge the problem of how Dew would know anything about it.

  “And I submit to you that if you did not say in your statement that you told Greene on the way home that Marshall wanted his wife killed, there would be no way you could explain how Dew would ever have approached you. That is an absolutely key part of the story. It is the underpinning.”

  With that in mind, Nathan Baird figuratively held a magnifying glass to the sworn statement L’Heureux had signed at the prosecutor’s office on December 21, 1984, as part of his plea-bargain agreement.

  “You say,” Baird said, “‘Upon my arrival there at the McDonald’s, Ricky told me that he had received word from somebody out of Dallas who wanted to put a contract on me for seventy-five thousand dollars.’ Is that what Ricky said?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you say, ‘That is a handsome sum’?”

  “I might have.”

  “And you did say, in fact, ‘What the hell for?’”

  “That is correct.”

  “Well, now, when you testified on your direct examination, you said you kind of knew why. If you kind of knew why, why would you ask, ‘What the hell for?’”

  “Well, you know,” L’Heureux said, “even though I said, ‘What the hell for?’ I kind of knew why.”

  “Well, let’s continue on,” Baird said. “‘He [Ricky] said that he understood that I had not fulfilled a contract that I had taken in New Jersey from a man and the man was willing to lay the money out to have me taken care of.’ Now did you believe, at that moment, that somebody who had given you at that point twenty-two thousand dollars was going to pay somebody else seventy-five thousand to kill you for not doing the job?”

  “He was the only one I could think of that might be doing that.”

  “Who is the ‘he’? Marshall?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you ever have any suggestion that Mr. Marshall would know somebody in Dallas who would be a contract killer for him?”

  “I had no knowledge of who he knew where.”

  “I see. Okay, then you say in this statement, ‘I didn’t know that what maybe he did have those kind of connections,’ and the ‘he’ you are referring to there is Marshall, is that right?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Let’s turn to the next page, which curiously enough is not numbered but since it is between fourteen and sixteen we will assume it is fifteen, okay? And you say, ‘And, uh, finally Ricky said, uh’—and then there’s an underlined blank—‘ “You know, our friend told me about the deal,” which I assume was Ricky, uh, Travis.’

  “Now, do you think the name Travis, or Travis Greene, was supposed to go in that blank?”

  “My thought at that time was
that Travis Greene had mentioned it to Ricky,” L’Heureux said.

  “This is very specific, though. Are you saying in your statement, in that sentence, are you saying that you thought Travis Greene told Ricky, or are you saying that Ricky told you that Travis Greene told him? Which are you saying?”

  “I am saying that is what I thought.”

  “So, Ricky did not, as the sentence reads—Ricky never said anything about Travis Greene telling him about that at all, correct?”

  “That is true.”

  And with that, Nathan Baird had succeeded in getting Ferlin L’Heureux to contradict not only his direct testimony (in which he’d told Kelly that Dew had mentioned Greene’s name), but also the sworn statement he’d given in December in return for the drastic reduction in charges against him.

  The Greene “underpinning” had collapsed. The “integral and necessary” part of L’Heureux’s statement—the part that served to keep all those reluctant players off the field—had been invalidated, leaving in place only his original story: that Dew had been offered a contract to kill him just one day after he’d passed word through Andrew Myers that he would not be coming north again.

  But the telling of that story wouldn’t help anyone, and there was no telling whom it might hurt.

  22

  Chris called Roby from Lehigh. It was the middle of the third week of trial.

  “Mrs. Rosenberg testifies tomorrow,” he said. “Are you going?”

  “Hell, yes. I want to sit close enough to spit.”

  “Remember the night of my prom, when Dad made us go over to her house just so she could see how nice we looked?”

  “I sure do. Just one more happy snapshot from the old family album.”

  “Well, I just thought of another. Remember the night of Mom and Dad’s twentieth-anniversary party, right after Christmas two years ago?”

  “Yeah, it was like Dad had invited the entire population of Ocean County.”

  “But it was a surprise for Mom, right?”

  “Yup. Dad loved surprises.”

  “Everybody they ever knew was there, right?”

  “Yeah, I even remember Raymond DiOrio showing up.”

  “So do I. In fact, he was wearing a brown tweed jacket. For some reason, I even remember that.”

  “Probably because you liked it so much you wanted to ask him where he’d bought it.”

  “And you remember when Dad brought out the bouquets?”

  “Are you kidding? I think we’ve got that on videotape. He gives her the big bouquet of white roses, twenty of them, and says, ‘One for each year of our blissfully happy marriage,’ or some bullshit like that.”

  “Right. And everybody claps and cheers.”

  “And then he gives her the three red roses—‘One for each of our three magnificent sons whom she’s raised to the threshold of adulthood.’ Yeah, I remember. I thought it was kind of cool that he called me magnificent. Six months later when I got bounced from Villanova, that wasn’t what he was calling me.”

  “But do you remember Mom, Roby? Do you remember Mom when he gave her those flowers and made that speech and then he leaned over and kissed her?”

  “Yeah, I remember. She was crying.”

  “Right. Tears of joy. Isn’t that what you thought?”

  “Of course.”

  “Think again.”

  “Oh, my God,” Roby said. “The affair had already started by then!”

  “It had been going on for six months.”

  “In fact, Mom had already hired her detective! Oh, my God, Chris, this is awful. That was one of the few happy memories I had left.”

  “Sorry to be the Grinch who stole Christmas, Roby, but I’m into reality these days. Do you remember who else was at that party? Standing right there clapping and cheering with everyone else?”

  “Mrs. Rosenberg,” Roby said quietly.

  “How could she do that?” Chris asked.

  “I wonder how the bitch could even walk through the front door,” Roby said.

  “At least you know now why Mom couldn’t stop crying, even when it got to be embarrassing.”

  “I guess they weren’t tears of joy,” Roby said.

  While he was in jail, awaiting trial, Rob had written a memoir of his affair with Felice. He began with the moment, at Jerry Mitchell’s party, when he had first sensed the limitless possibilities.

  “She walked onto the patio deck on that hot day early in July,” he wrote, “looking around for the approval she knew she would get. Her curly jet-black hair fell onto her shoulders, complementing the red jumpsuit which clung to her thin frame. Our eyes met with a smile as she walked toward me under the yellow and white tent canopy. All the playful sexual innuendo that had been going on between us for years came to a head that afternoon.”

  It was exactly this sort of impact that Kevin Kelly did not want when he summoned her to the stand on Thursday afternoon during the third week of trial.

  “I can play it any way you want it,” she had told him. “I can be a schoolmarm or else I can Felice it up.”

  He had strongly advised the schoolmarm image, and that was what he got, as she appeared wearing an ankle-length gray suit and a red blouse securely clamped at the throat by a demure silver brooch.

  The sixty-five-seat courtroom was hushed and, for the first time since the trial had begun, filled to capacity. To hear Felice—or, rather, in anticipation of watching her squirm—many of the Toms River matrons had managed to overcome the sense of propriety that had heretofore kept them away from Mays Landing.

  Felice had told Kelly that she was worried about several things, among them any references to previous extramarital affairs. But mostly she seemed worried about Patsy Racine’s name coming up publicly.

  “She did not want to have to mention his name,” Kelly said.

  On the stand, Felice was stoic and composed, the fires of passion thoroughly damped for the occasion. She didn’t even seem as if she’d be much fun at a game of Trivial Pursuit.

  Refusing to look him in the eye, or to look anywhere near him, Felice said she’d known Rob for “fifteen or sixteen years” and that they “moved in the same social circles.”

  Throughout their affair, she said, “We had many discussions about the debts that he had,” including one in which “he made reference to the fact that if [Maria] were not around, the insurance money would definitely take care of the debts.”

  She said Rob had been “very upset at his home situation, very frustrated,” because Maria “was pulling in the reins. She was hovering over him. She was aware that there was some problem between them, and she was suspicious that there was a relationship between us. She was bombarding him with these suspicions to the point that he was very upset, and in a conversation with me said something like, ‘I swear if there were a way that I could either “do away” or “get rid of” her, I would.’ And he asked if I knew anyone that would do such a thing.”

  “What did you say, ma’am?” Kelly asked.

  “I didn’t think he was serious,” she said coolly, “and I told him that there was only one other person who I even knew who had any kind of dealings with the law, and he wouldn’t even consider doing such a thing and that the idea was absurd and out of the question and I could have nothing to do with him if he even considered pursuing it.”

  Kelly did not ask her who that person was.

  Then, in his questioning, he reached the morning of September 6. All relevant phone calls from that day were listed on a large chart that had been placed at the front of the courtroom.

  Kelly pointed to the 9:46 A.M. call from Rob to her and her return call from a different telephone two minutes later.

  “Do you recollect that scenario, as to what happened and why?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you just explain that to us?” he asked, almost deferentially.

  “I was interviewing a candidate for a teaching position,” she said, “and was interrupted by a secretary to say th
at there was an urgent call, an urgent call that had been made to me by Mr. Marshall. I went into the principal’s office and received the first call for one minute and twenty-seven seconds [a duration reflected on the chart] and after concluding that call and excusing myself from the interview, went, I believe, to a pay phone and called him back.”

  Kevin Kelly did not ask Felice a single further question about those calls. Indeed, he never referred to them again.

  In regard to their in-person meeting that afternoon—after Rob and L’Heureux had already chosen the site where Maria would die—Felice said only that Rob had seemed “subdued.” Not, she said, his “normally quite enthusiastic and outgoing and happy-go-lucky—not happy-go-lucky, that’s wrong—confident” self.

  She added, “I do remember him telling me that he was annoyed because he was going to be going to Atlantic City that night. He didn’t really want to go, but his wife insisted.”

  She said she had been “just appalled by the deception” when she’d learned of Rob’s lies to her concerning his relationship with Myers and L’Heureux.

  “Was your relationship with him based on honesty and trust?” Kelly asked.

  “Yes. That was sort of a foundation,” she said.

  And that was it. Kelly was finished with her in half an hour.

  Carl Seely, who did not propose to be finished in half an hour, began his cross-examination cautiously. Indeed, some of his early questioning was almost comical in its courtliness.

  “Would you agree with me,” he said, “at least that in regard to your contact with him and your feelings about him, and his reputation in the community, that Rob was a decent type of person, a decent man?”

  “Yes.”

  “And can we at least assume had you not at least felt that and believed that, you certainly would not have permitted yourself to get involved in any type of relationship with a man other than someone like that?”