Blind Faith

by Joe McGinniss

  “That’s true,” Felice said.

  “Now, the relationship, I think you indicated, began sometime around July of 1983. Do you recall where you first met?”

  “I’m not sure. I think it was the Smithville Inn.”

  “Some type of prearranged meeting or was it spontaneous?”

  “No, it was prearranged.”

  “How did you happen to set it up?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “You were both members of the same country club, correct?”

  “Yes. We belonged to the same country club. He played tennis. I played tennis. My husband played tennis.”

  “Well, do you recall whether or not the first contact was in a restaurant, for example?”

  “The first contact?”

  “The first contact where you and he met for the first time and the start of this relationship outside of your respective marriages began. That was certainly an important moment, wasn’t it?”

  “I have already told you, we met at the Smithville Inn.”

  “Okay. What I’m trying to find out is, how did it come to be that you met there?”

  “There was a phone call,” she said, “but I don’t recall who made it.”

  “Were you going there for dinner?”

  “No, we were meeting there and we were going somewhere afterwards. We were going to a motel, Mr. Seely.”

  “Well, obviously, before you got there you knew what the purpose was and you knew where you were going to end up.”

  “Unquestionably.”

  “Well, had you had any discussions before that date about doing this, or was it one of those whirlwind kind of things and you decide to run off to the Smithville and go to a motel?”

  “Yes, there were discussions.”

  “On that day, or the day before?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Who initiated the discussions?”

  “Who initiated? Mr. Marshall initiated the discussions.”

  “When did he first call you?”

  “Sometime early in July.”

  “And was that at home or in the office?”

  “In my office.”

  “Well, how did he get your office number, just looked it up in the phone book?”

  Finally, Felice let some impatience show. “Are you asking me whether he asked me about this at a party? Is that what you are aiming at? Is that what you want? Yes, there was a party at which he came up to me and discussed this and asked for my phone number. That’s where he got it.”

  “The Smithville,” Seely said. “How far is that from where the two of you lived in Toms River?”

  “About an hour away.”

  “Was the purpose of going there the hope that no one would see the two of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You had a certain image and certain, if you will, identity in the community, did you not, that you wanted to, you know, continue with?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s a small town, isn’t it, Toms River, at least in terms of the town itself and the people who know one another? It’s somewhat of a tight-knit little group, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And isn’t it true that you had a sensitive enough position as vice principal of a school so that certainly you didn’t want to be in the position where some type of scandal or some type of allegation about your conduct would reflect on your ability to be an administrator?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Because it certainly is a very sensitive position, where you supervise young people. Right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And can we assume at least that the standards of the school are such that if they thought you were doing something which would cause damage to the reputation of the school, they might want to fire you?”

  “That’s true.”

  “So when Maria became suspicious of you, did you take steps to try to be more discreet?”

  “Absolutely. In fact, there were at least two times when as a result of suspicions that I was becoming aware of, I backed away from the relationship.”

  “When was the first time?”

  “It was in late fall 1983.”

  “When would the second time have been?”

  “It was in 1984, early spring.”

  Apropos of late fall, Seely asked Felice if she could “pin down exactly” when the conversation had taken place in which Rob had first mentioned hiring someone to murder Maria.

  “No, I can’t,” she said. “Closest I can pin it down is November, December or January ’83, ’84.”

  “Do you remember where you were? Were you, for example, in a motel room or restaurant, or in his car?”

  “To the best of my recollection it happened in a telephone conversation. I was at school.”

  “I assume he called you?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember whether he called you or you called him?” Seely had a hard time containing his amazement. The purported topic of the conversation, after all, had been the murder of his client’s wife.

  “The likelihood is he called me,” Felice said, “but I can’t pinpoint the conversation enough to know for sure.”

  “Can you estimate about how long the two of you were talking during that particular conversation?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Do you recall anything else that was said?”

  “I know that we changed the subject shortly after that part of the conversation and went on to other things. It was dismissed as being an outburst that was bizarre, outrageous, not to be taken seriously.”

  “And do you recall whether or not it was more likely that the conversation took place at the end of ’83 or beginning of ’84?”

  “I would say the end of ’83.”

  “So that would mean it was probably sometime in December.”

  “Very possibly.”

  That would have meant also, though Seely did not explore this, that the conversation in which Rob first mentioned having Maria murdered would have come at a point in time very close to the twentieth-anniversary party at which he presented her with the bouquets—the party that Felice attended.

  In addition, it would have meant that Rob’s first mention of the possibility of “doing away with” or “getting rid of” Maria, would have come quite soon after the first occasion in “late fall,” when Maria’s suspicions had caused Felice to “back away” from the affair.

  But this was not a cause-and-effect relationship that Carl Seely was eager to establish. He turned his attention instead to the second occasion on which Felice had “backed away,” and to what had preceded it.

  “Now, you mentioned that you and Rob and many of the people in the Toms River area traveled in the same social set and have friends in common. Is it not true that one of these people is a lawyer named Tom Kenyon?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “It’s true, is it not, that Mr. Kenyon was a close friend of yours? In other words, he was a close friend of yours and really did not have that type of close relationship with Rob Marshall or Maria?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And do you remember attending a function at the Toms River Country Club where you had discussions with Tom Kenyon with regard to your situation as it related to Rob?”

  “Yes, I do. It was probably March of 1984, perhaps February, and it was a dinner dance at the club, and Tom Kenyon, while he was dancing with me, told me that Maria had come to see him regarding her suspicions about Rob’s infidelity.”

  “He recommended to you that you cease the relationship, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “He also suggested, did he not, that Maria may have hired an investigator, may have hired counsel?”

  “He may have said that, but I don’t remember.”

  “Did you at any time after that have any further conversations with Tom Kenyon with regard to your relationship with Rob, or Mrs. Marshall’s r
etention of an attorney and an investigator?”

  “To the best of my recollection, no. However, it’s possible—no, I’m sorry. I correct that. It seems to me I called him. I did. I called him the following week after Rob and I had discussed what had happened. Rob was not at that dinner dance and we agreed that I should call Tom back and get more specifics on what it was he was trying to tell me that night. So I did call him back. But I don’t remember what he told me that night versus what he told me in the phone conversation.”

  Whatever he had told her, however, seemed enough to cause her, as she testified, to once again “back away” from the affair.

  Whether that in turn caused Rob to intensify his efforts to find someone to murder Maria was not a question anyone in the prosecutor’s office had ever explored.

  It is a fact, however, that the meeting with Myers occurred in May, soon after Felice’s second episode of “backing away” from the affair, just as the conversation in which she’d given Rob the name of Patsy Racine (a name she was determined not to mention publicly) had taken place soon after her first such episode.

  One might infer that Rob reacted strongly to any displays of recalcitrance on Felice’s part.

  In any case, they soon passed. By summer—after Rob had spoken to Myers and after L’Heureux had begun his travels north—Felice’s attitude toward the relationship underwent a significant shift.

  “I made a commitment to myself,” she said, “to choose the life in which I could be honest, and no longer feel the push and pull of the ambivalent feelings that were plaguing me. By then, Rob and I had made a commitment that somewhere down the line we were going to be together permanently.”

  “But,” asked Seely, “wouldn’t you agree with me, at least, that one of the things Rob was trying to do and one of the things you were certainly trying to do was to maintain the social status that you both had in the community?”

  “I have a problem answering that as a yes or no, Mr. Seely,” she said, “because implicit in our relationship was the knowledge that the social status that we may have enjoyed together or independently was going to be tremendously disrupted. We were very aware of that. Our entire social status would undergo a total upheaval once we left our respective spouses.”

  “But that would only have occurred, would it not, if at some point he left and you left and then the two of you went together. Until then, certainly neither you nor he would have wanted your circle of friends, or anyone for that matter, to know about the relationship, isn’t that a fair statement?”

  “Only in the beginning. As time went on we became more committed to one another and less committed to our respective spouses to the point we were ready to go public.”

  “In fact, that time never did come, did it?”

  “It would have come,” she said.

  But murder came first.

  So Seely tried to show that Felice had a motive for trying to hurt Rob through her testimony. He contended the obvious: public awareness of the affair and its link with the murder had forced her not only to leave her thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year vice principal’s job, but had pushed her out of the field of education altogether.

  “Without question,” she agreed, “my perception is that I would not be a welcome addition to most educational staffs.”

  “You sound a little bitter. Are you still bitter about this?”

  “I’m not happy about it. I’m not happy about appearing on this witness stand.”

  Seely then proceeded to make her a little less happy, asking about her encounter with the Ocean County prosecutor’s office on the day of the murder.

  “You were a little concerned, weren’t you, whether they thought you had anything to do with anything?”

  “I really don’t remember,” she said.

  “You don’t recall whether or not you may have asked them whether or not they thought you may be some type of suspect or target?”

  “I might have asked that question, but I really don’t remember.”

  “But you were concerned, weren’t you, on September seventh, 1984, after the police processed you, fingerprinted you and took your photographs, that they may have suspected that in some way you may have had some involvement in whatever went on here?”

  “Yes.”

  “And was that concern sufficient to keep you from seeing Rob for at least the next few days?”

  “I didn’t see Rob from September seventh to September fourteenth.”

  “In other words, a whole week went by when you didn’t see him?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Then you continued to see him after the fourteenth, didn’t you?”

  “That’s correct,” she said. “By that time my position had been clarified, according to my lawyer, and I was no longer concerned about any involvement in the suspicion that existed.”

  “You were certainly very concerned on nine seven eighty-four,” Seely said, “because it’s not often that one ends up getting fingerprints taken and photographs taken by the authorities and questioned by the authorities in a case that may be a potential homicide. Right?”

  “That’s true,” Felice said.

  The very next day, she had retained the Trenton lawyer, Anthony Trammel. This was the same day on which Rob met with Raymond DiOrio, although DiOrio’s bill reflects that he’d actually started work on the case the day before.

  On Sunday, she’d driven to Trenton to meet with Trammel and an associate.

  “Did you get any assurances at that time,” Seely asked, “from your lawyers, that at least in their opinion they felt that the prosecutors were not looking at you as any type of target in any criminal investigation?”

  “No, I did not,” she said. “They caused me to feel that I clearly could be considered connected to this case if Rob were—if the finger were pointed at Rob.”

  But then, within a week, and for no apparent investigatory reason, Felice’s position had been “clarified.” That week, of course, coincided with the period of Ray DiOrio’s involvement in the case.

  Seely tried to probe this a bit. In regard to her first meeting with Rob after the murder, he asked, “This was supposed to be a clandestine or secretive type of encounter, right?”

  “Yes. That was a sensitive issue. His wife had been murdered, and for me to appear with him publicly was a totally insensitive thing to do.”

  “Nevertheless, you voluntarily made arrangements to see him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did. I called him. I asked him to come to my house.”

  Seely stared coldly at her from across the courtroom and paused before asking his next question.

  “Did the prosecutor’s office or your lawyers or anybody ever suggest to you that at some point in time you contact Rob, so you could talk to him, find out whatever you could about—”

  “Absolutely not,” she interrupted.

  “They never did that?”

  “Unquestionably not. I called him because at that point I had been isolated from my family and my so-called friends. I was alone and was feeling very much in need of his support.”

  “You have a lot of other friends besides Rob, don’t you?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Do you have other friends?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “You lost all your friends because of this?”

  “Most of them.”

  “You are right now with no friends?”

  “I didn’t say ‘none.’”

  “But in other words, the one person on this earth that you could contact for some kind of emotional support on September fifteenth, 1984, you are telling us, was Rob Marshall.”

  “That’s absolutely correct.”

  “So you reached out for him to help you?”

  “Yes, I think I asked him to come over to my place at the beach.”

  “Did he do it?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “How soon after you called him?”

  “I think it was quickly.”
>
  “He came running, right?”

  “To the best of my recollection, yes.”

  “When he came running to you on nine fifteen eighty-four, did you then sit and chat?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You don’t remember what happened?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You remember how long he stayed over?”

  “I don’t think it was very long, but I don’t remember.”

  “Did you confide in him what the nature was of your problems and your concerns and what was worrying you, and your feelings?”

  “I probably did, but I am not sure.”

  “Did you ever ask Rob, ‘Hey, Rob, did you have anything to do with the death of your wife?’”

  “I don’t know. I doubt it, because at that point I didn’t think it was possible.”

  “Did you ever ask him that question?” Seely demanded.

  “I really don’t know, but I might have.”

  “You might have?”

  “I might have.”

  “You might have,” Seely repeated. “Did you tell the prosecutor’s office about the visit and what you talked about?”

  “I’m sure I told them about the visit, but I didn’t—I don’t remember telling them anything we talked about.”

  The day ended with Seely still in the midst of his cross-examination and with Felice appearing as unperturbed as when she’d begun and with her memory’s extraordinary selectivity still intact.

  Because of scheduling necessities and the Presidents’ Day holiday, Felice would not be returning to the stand until the following Tuesday. That gave her a long weekend to spend at home, reading the papers.

  23

  There were front-page close-up photographs in the Ocean County Observer and the Asbury Park Press (which even used color).

  Headlines like FELICE: ROB WANTED TO “DO AWAY WITH” WIFE, and worse, far worse—in fact she could not believe this when she read it—a report of how Carl Seely had told the judge, prior to her being summoned to the stand, that he intended to question her about past love affairs because he considered that to be “a fertile area.”