Fatal Jealousy: The True Story of a Doomed Romance, a Singular Obsession, and a Quadruple Murder

by McEvoy, Colin

Furthermore, and perhaps more important, Morganelli didn’t need Riddick. The only real value of his testimony was Ballard’s claims that he killed Steve Zernhelt to eliminate witnesses, which was an aggravating factor for the death penalty. Morganelli would have to withdraw that aggravating factor, but the others would still stand.

  “Okay, no problem,” Morganelli said, standing up. “I’ll probably write a letter now saying you didn’t cooperate and make sure you serve your max.”

  Without another word to Riddick, Morganelli walked out of the room and instructed the sheriff’s deputies to take the inmate back to prison.

  CHAPTER 25

  With Morganelli no longer planning to call Wilfredo Riddick to the stand, it was time for the defense to present their case. Corriere had made it clear that Ballard would not testify on his own behalf. Instead, the attorney intended to play an audio recording of a phone call a tearful Ballard made to his father from the prison July 6.

  Morganelli had objected to the jury hearing the conversation, calling the move a thinly veiled effort to generate sympathy for Ballard without having him testify, thus giving Morganelli no chance to cross-examine him.

  Judge Smith considered the objection, but after listening to the tape himself, he overruled it. The judge felt that there was no risk of the tape generating sympathy because there was nothing in the recording that was sympathetic. He showed no remorse for having killed Denise in the recording and, although he did become emotional while talking to his father, all of Ballard’s sympathy was for himself, not her.

  “I did everything I was supposed to do and she played me like a fiddle. Played with my fucking heart,” Ballard’s voice said in the audio recording. As it played, Denise’s aunt Susan Stahler started to cry from the courtroom audience, her shoulders shaking as she tried to fight back her sobs.

  Corriere also called Penny Lynn Sines, who had worked closely with Ballard when she was a correctional counselor at SCI–Laurel Highlands. She was ultimately one of the several people who made a recommendation for his 2006 parole.

  Seeking to create sympathy for his client, Corriere questioned Sines about Ballard having volunteered to work at the prison’s hospice unit for elderly prisoners. Sines explained that it was a particularly unpopular job at the prison because it involved such unpleasant work as interacting with sick inmates, answering their requests, and cleaning out their bedpans. Nevertheless, she said, Ballard willingly did it for two years.

  But when it came time for his cross-examination, Morganelli had other subjects he wished to discuss. He questioned Sines about her role in Ballard’s release. She explained that the decision was far from hers alone, that she was one of several staff members from the prison, the state parole board, and the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections who prepared Ballard’s pre-parole case file by reviewing, among other things, his criminal history, the completion of institutional programs, and his history of prison misconducts.

  It was the last part that Morganelli focused on. He questioned Sines about nearly a dozen infractions Ballard had committed in prison between 1993 and 2005, including his refusals to obey orders, possession of controlled substances, trying to punch a corrections officer, and becoming violent with a guard while he tried to inspect Ballard’s cell. Morganelli took his time describing each infraction in great detail for the jury and questioning why Sines voted to release him despite those infractions.

  Correire objected to the line of questioning, suggesting it was irrelevant. During a sidebar discussion with the two attorneys, outside the earshot of the jury and courtroom audience, Judge Smith warned Morganelli he did not want the witness to be placed on trial for the sins of the entire parole department. The district attorney agreed, but said he believed the questions were relevant because they spoke to Sines’s credibility.

  “I want to show that she overlooked a long history of discipline problems in the prison,” Morganelli told the judge. “… Her judgment was bad. Her judgment was bad in putting Ballard out there. Her judgment was bad in overlooking discipline problems, and it goes to impeaching her ultimate testimony, which is that he was a good guy to put into the elderly home.”

  Smith overruled Corriere’s objections and allowed Morganelli to continue. Sines acknowledged the long list of prison misconduct reports were accurate but said there were far fewer incidents during his later time in prison, that Ballard never had problems with the elderly patients he cared for, and that he received “average work reports.” She had interviewed Ballard multiple times, she said, but even so she was only one of many people involved in his release.

  Nevertheless, when his cross-examination was complete, Morganelli felt satisfied that he had damaged her credibility in the eyes of the jury.

  Corriere next presented a number of witnesses from Ballard’s past, from whom the defense attorney sought to present Ballard’s childhood as one of great difficulty amid a broken home. In particular, he sought to portray Mickey Ballard as an uncaring father who had essentially thrown his son out on the street.

  James Acker, an officer with Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Arkansas, testified about arresting Mickey Ballard in 1981. He described Mickey charging toward him with a fireplace poker and threatening to kill him before Acker hit him on the head with his flashlight, all while a young Michael Ballard watched.

  “My first inclination was to shoot him, but I didn’t want to do that, so I used the flashlight,” said Acker, who added that he never knew Mickey to get into legal trouble again, that he attended the funeral of Mickey’s mother five years later, and that Mickey was very cordial with him.

  A number of other figures from Ballard’s early years took the stand after Acker. Lavern Cook, Ballard’s former caretaker, spoke about how Mickey Ballard all but abandoned his son during the boy’s childhood. She described how a young Michael Ballard used to wait at the window for Mickey to visit him during holidays and birthdays, and how crushed Ballard was when Mickey never showed up.

  Rhonda Maples, a friend from Ballard’s childhood, described how Ballard would come to school with bruises, and said that when she asked about them, Michael claimed they had come from his father. She spoke of the time that she was waiting for Michael outside of his father’s home, and overhead Mickey yelling at him, calling him “good for nothing” and a “no-good worthless bastard.”

  Justin Cook Letwich, Lavern’s son, reaffirmed some of that testimony. He described the time that Mickey Ballard, in a drunken state, accidentally fired a gun inside Lavern’s house, shooting out one of the windows. Justin also claimed he would often see Ballard appearing bruised and beaten up.

  “He would always tell me that, ‘Me and Dad got in a fight,’” Letwich testified.

  Morganelli sought to cast doubt on the idea that Mickey Ballard was an abusive father somehow responsible for Ballard’s crimes. During cross-examination, Morganelli asked each witness if they ever actually saw Mickey hit his son, and each had to admit they had not. The district attorney pointed out that Ballard still maintained contact with his father and, when interviewed at the prison, had claimed he had a good relationship with his parents. In fact, Ballard specifically and adamantly denied that his parents had ever physically abused him during his childhood, Morgnanelli said.

  Ballard showed little emotion during the testimony about his father, but a few rows behind him, Danielle Kaufman seemed visibly uneasy about it. She understood that Ballard’s attorney was doing his job, and that presenting Mickey Ballard in such an unflattering light was a strategy they were using to help Michael. But based on her correspondence with Ballard, she did not believe his father had been abusive.

  I don’t like how he’s throwing his dad under the bus, she thought.

  Mickey Ballard himself had been subpoenaed in case they planned to call him to testify, but when they later informed him they would not be asking him to speak, he did not bother coming to the trial at all. Mickey later said he was not pleased with how he was portrayed by the defense attorneys.r />
  “They didn’t even give me the damn courtesy to speak at the trial, so I don’t have much regard for how they treated me there,” he later said. “I felt like I should have had a say.”

  By Friday, May 13, the fourth day of the trial, Corriere was ready to present testimony by the psychologists and mitigation specialists. Coupled with the previous testimony from family and friends, the defense attorney sought to use the defense experts to emphasize Ballard’s difficult childhood, emotional problems, and brain damage, with the hope of persuading at least one juror that there were enough mitigating factors to spare him the death penalty. It was a difficult balancing act for Corriere, who had to make his case without sounding like he was making excuses for his client.

  Louise Luck, Ballard’s mitigation specialist, spoke about the extreme dysfunction Ballard had experienced throughout his childhood, from the abandonment by his mother, and the trust issues it created for Ballard with women, to his father throwing Ballard out of his home. Luck spoke of Ballard living in homes with no running water, going to the bathroom in a bucket, and having only a single pair of jeans while growing up.

  “Life was pretty sparse,” she said. “… His mother deserted him. It was anything but a loving environment. It was an angry environment.”

  Between the psychological trauma Ballard suffered at such a critical developmental stage, and the brain damage from his multiple head injuries, Luck said Ballard was more susceptible to alcohol, experienced increased aggression and decreased empathy, and had great difficulty in controlling his emotions.

  It was difficult testimony for members of the victims’ families to hear. The final straw for Geraldine Dorwart was when Luck testified that relatives might have sexually molested Ballard when he was five years old. Upon hearing that, she and other members of the family stormed out of the courtroom. Questioned outside by reporters, Geraldine described listening to the testimony as nothing more than an extension of her family’s suffering.

  “It’s horrible,” she told Morning Call reporter Riley Yates. “People thought the worst was over. It’s not over … Now we have to hear his excuses.”

  Geraldine told the reporter that everybody has gone through difficulties in their childhood and throughout their lives.

  “He is no different than anybody else,” she said. “But does that give him the right to take those four lives like that?”

  Back inside the courtroom, Morganelli was doing the best that he could to discredit Luck’s testimony on cross-examination. He accused her of over-emphasizing all the sympathetic elements of Ballard’s past and ignoring everything else from her report.

  To drive the point home, he spoke of the letter Ballard had written to Luck describing a dream he had about killing people with a shotgun at Denise’s house, all the while laughing hysterically until he woke up.

  The district attorney also cited other writings from Ballard in which he called Denise a “harlot” and rationalized killing her as a way of absolving the sins of her infidelity.

  “I judged her in righteousness and I prayed on it,” Ballard had written in the letter. Just as he had written in some of his religious ramblings to Danielle Kaufman, Ballard claimed he decided to cleanse the home he shared with Denise from her sins, and implied that by killing her he had actually saved her.

  “The rest of us live in sin, while my baby’s free from sin,” he wrote. As Morganelli finished his questioning, he was confident that when the jury later recalled Luck’s testimony, they would remember those statements from Ballard, not the claims she made about his difficult past or head injuries.

  The forensic psychologist Gerald Cooke spoke next, and Corriere also tried to use his testimony to portray Ballard in a more sympathetic light. Cooke explained that he, like others, had diagnosed Ballard as having anti-social personality disorder and severe depression problems. The brain injuries he suffered from fights and motorcycle accidents meant Ballard had significant trouble controlling his emotions, particularly in stressful situations.

  Morganelli tried to cast doubt on Cooke’s testimony by pointing out that Ballard could vividly remember details of the murder and other memories from his past, and he questioned how that could be if Ballard really suffered from a brain disorder. Cooke countered that such memories might not be affected by this type of disorder but admitted that Ballard’s IQ nevertheless fell in the upper side of the average range.

  Before testimony wrapped on Friday, Corriere presented one more witness: Walter Chruby, an inmate who had served time at SCI–Laurel Highlands at the same time Ballard was there. Chruby, who testified via videoconference, said he had major kidney problems and often ended up in the medical unit, where Ballard worked as a janitor and always showed Chruby a great amount of kindness.

  “Mike was a great guy to all of us,” Chruby said.

  Corriere hoped that, as with Penny Lynn Sines, the testimony from Chruby would show that there was a kinder, gentler side of Ballard that thrived even in a prison atmosphere. But, just as he had with Sines, Morganelli sought to cut that idea off at the knees.

  “What are you in for?” Morganelli started off with his cross-examination.

  “I’m serving a life sentence for first-degree murder,” Chruby replied. He had stabbed a seventy-three-year-old woman thirty-three times inside her home at State College, Pennsylvania, in 1995.

  “No further questions,” Morganelli said in response.

  * * *

  When the trial resumed the following Monday, May 16, Corriere announced something that took the entire courtroom by storm: The defense was about to rest.

  The defense attorney still had a slate of defense experts—James Garbarino, Robert Sadoff, Frank Dattilio, and Susan Rushing—who had yet to testify, but Corriere made the tactical decision not to put them on the stand. Corriere believed—and he admitted it openly when questioned later by reporters—that allowing them to testify would only open the door for Morganelli to bring up extremely provocative and damaging details about Ballard’s letters to Danielle Kaufman during his cross-examination.

  It was a risky move, as it meant excluding much of the findings that could possibly have helped his client, but Corriere believed it was the right one. One only had to look at Morganelli’s responses to the testimony of Luck and Cooke to see how he had taken every negative aspect of their reports and magnified it for the jury.

  If the district attorney could segue from the other defense witnesses into Danielle’s letters, it would allow him to bring up Ballard’s detailed descriptions of the murders, or his claim that he “should have raped” Denise’s daughter. There were the letters smeared with his own blood. The requests for Danielle to dig up dirt on other inmates for him. The threats he made against a Northampton County Prison guard.

  Corriere believed the benefit of keeping that information away from the jurors far outweighed the loss of the more positive aspects of their testimony. And, if Morganelli’s reaction was any indication, the district attorney felt the same way. He told reporters from the Express-Times and Morning Call that he still hoped to introduce some of Danielle’s letters into the record, and he planned to do some legal research about whether he would be able to. Nothing ever came of it.

  Corriere briefly recalled Trooper Raymond Judge to ask questions about the ninety-six text messages Ballard and Denise had exchanged with each other in the days prior to the murders. The attorney emphasized those early messages where Denise expressed excitement about having Ballard’s baby, and Ballard’s attempts to reassure her when Denise expressed concern that others might see her as a “whore.” After that brief effort to remind the jury of that human side of Ballard, Corriere officially brought his defense to a rest.

  CHAPTER 26

  If eliminating parole is not the solution to stopping violent crime from repeat offenders like Michael Ballard, then what is? Perhaps it lies in addressing a crippling prison overpopulation problem in the United States, particularly due to a disproportionately high number of co
nvictions for drug-related crimes. If such sentences were reduced, parole boards might be able to give proper attention to serious, violent offenders like Michael Ballard.

  By the time Ballard appeared before the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole, it had been experiencing a backlog that was consistent with an enormous growth in prison populations. This was true not only in Pennsylvania but throughout the nation. And it all seems to correlate with the start of the War on Drugs.

  Although the term War on Drugs was first used by Richard Nixon in 1971, it is widely thought to have been “declared” by Ronald Reagan on November 14, 1982. Since that time, sentencing guidelines have become far stricter for drug offenses, most notably with the passage of the federal Anti–Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988. Many states have made parole much more difficult, and mandatory minimum sentences, recidivist statutes, and other new laws have been put in place to keep inmates incarcerated much longer for non-violent drug-related crimes.

  In September 2006, when the Pennsylvania parole board considered Ballard’s first request for parole, it was one of 1,713 parole and re-parole decisions made that month alone. When Ballard reappeared before them again in December 2009 following his second brief incarceration, his was one of 1,614 cases that month.

  Those figures are enormous compared with those twenty years earlier, when the number of parole cases stemming from arrests from the War on Drugs was just starting to take hold. In 1989, the monthly average was 528 parole decisions, less than one-third the number of cases on the board’s plate both times Ballard came before them.

  Those figures are consistent with the growth in overall actions taken by the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole over the years. In 1989, they considered 6,341 parole and re-parole decisions. That figure continued to climb over the years until it had swelled to 22,734 by 2011, according to the board. That’s an increase of just over 358 percent in twenty-two years.

  That growth in parole cases raises a question. If the board had fewer cases related to drugs and non-violent offenses before them, and more time for violent criminals, might decisions to release people like Michael Ballard have gone differently?