Fox is Framed

by Lachlan Smith

  “What evidence, if any, did you have that was not available to the investigators twenty-one years ago?”

  “From the start, I knew that Mrs. Maxwell had been having an affair with a married man at the time of her death. I had a set of pictures that were taken of them together, which had been filed by Maxwell’s lawyers as newly discovered evidence. Evidently he’d gotten these pictures from the family of the woman who’d had them taken. These pictures were never brought to the attention of the police at the time of the original investigation.”

  Crowder introduced the pictures into evidence, solving what otherwise might have been a thorny problem for Nina, and one that had occupied several hours of research time for me, since the private investigator who’d taken the pictures was untraceable and we had no other way of proving that the pictures were what we said. However, as long as Nina didn’t object, Crowder could introduce whatever evidence she wanted. These pictures had come to Teddy from Keith Locke’s sister, and both sides had agreed that they’d be admitted.

  “Were you able to identify the man with whom she’d been having the affair?”

  “I was. He’s a physician at UCSF.”

  “Did you consider him a suspect?”

  “Initially, yes, but the physical evidence ruled him out. The semen collected from the victim’s body at the crime scene has been destroyed, but the results of the tests they ran on it are still available. Although these tests can’t make a positive confirmation of the killer’s identity, we can use the results to rule out suspects whose blood types don’t match the blood type of the donor.”

  “How were you able to determine that the semen in her body didn’t belong to this man?”

  “I went to his lawyer and asked if he would give a blood sample. He readily agreed. The semen collected from her body at the crime scene didn’t match his blood type. He’s O negative; the donor was type A positive. Simple as that.”

  “Based on your experience, is there any way that a DNA sample would have turned up a different result?”

  Nina objected that Crowder hadn’t established Shanahan’s expertise in DNA testing, but Liu overruled her. The point was obvious.

  “No chance,” Shanahan said. “If the blood types don’t match, then we’re dealing with two different people. I don’t need DNA to tell me that. Even so, I asked the doctor’s attorney if I could interview him. He’d been in an intimate relationship with the victim at the time of her death, and I thought that he might have relevant information. Of course, twenty-one years had passed. As it turned out, however, his memory was quite clear.”

  “What conclusions, if any, did you form based on the fact that the DNA didn’t match?”

  This was the weak point of Crowder’s case, and she was not going to make the jurors wait for her answer to what ought to have been a thorny dilemma. Shanahan’s answer was audacious and cunning: “I concluded that the victim must have had multiple boyfriends.”

  “What was the focus of your investigation after speaking with the physician?”

  “After that conversation, my focus was on the defendant, Lawrence Maxwell.”

  “Why was that your focus at this point?”

  “Because of information I received from my interview. The doctor told me that Caroline was deathly afraid of her husband, that she was convinced that sooner or later he would find out, and something terrible would happen. He also told me he was convinced she’d been unfaithful to her husband with other men.” Nina interrupted with a hearsay objection, an objection that I’d been itching for her to make ever since the previous question. Liu overruled her on the shaky ground that she’d attacked Shanahan’s investigation and the state was entitled to rehabilitate it.

  Shanahan went on. “He didn’t take her seriously. She was a dramatic woman, and he thought it excited her to pretend that the danger was greater than it actually was. After speaking with him, I felt certain that the motive was jealousy.”

  “What did you do next?”

  I felt relieved as I realized that this was all they had, their only answer. Under the state’s theory, it seemed equally probable that Caroline’s other lover, and not Lawrence, had killed her, if such a man even existed. I hoped that this point was as obvious to the jurors as it was to me.

  “I began tracking down and interviewing men who’d known Maxwell in prison. Twenty-one years is a long time to spend behind bars. In all that time, I figured he might have opened up to someone.”

  “Whom did you speak with during this part of your investigation?”

  Shanahan repeated the testimony he’d given at the prelim about his conversation with Russell Bell in which Bell had related Lawrence’s alleged confession behind bars, concluding with my father’s alleged statement about his only regret being that I was the one who’d found her body.

  “Did Maxwell say why his younger son hadn’t been to visit him in all those years?”

  “It was obvious. His father had murdered his mother and the kid knew it. He’d found the body.”

  As if from far away, I heard Nina’s objection. But my eyes were on Shanahan, who’d turned his own gaze on me as he made this statement. I felt the jurors’ eyes follow his.

  Angela Crowder chose this moment to introduce the 911 call I’d made, and before I knew what was happening she was playing it. The child’s voice that had once been mine filled the courtroom. It’s my mom, the small voice said. She’s hurt.

  The light in the courtroom seemed to change. It was as if an actor had stepped off the stage and taken my hand against my will.

  After the recording, Crowder went through the confession a few more times, fleshing out all the details, getting Shanahan to repeat the crucial parts, asking questions the only point of which was to burn Bell’s words into the jurors’ brains, emphasizing the past tense just enough to beg the question of where Russell was and why he wasn’t here to testify in person.

  Shanahan’s testimony was simple, to the point, and devastatingly effective in establishing my father’s guilt. Sooner than I expected, Crowder’s examination was finished.

  We broke for lunch, and then it was Nina’s turn.

  Chapter 16

  She stood at the podium, her hair swept back and held in a tight knot with a comb, the light finding the tender place at the side of her jaw. I was almost as aware of the jurors looking at her as I’d been of them looking at me, and I felt a stirring of pride at the relaxed set of her shoulders, the way she stared Shanahan in the eye as if he were a captive animal and she knew how to handle him.

  “You just testified about a set of pictures filed as newly discovered evidence. Who took them?”

  “My understanding is that they were taken by a private investigator hired by the wife of the man Caroline Maxwell had been having her affair with, but I don’t know that for certain. They were discovered by Teddy Maxwell, the defendant’s oldest son. I understand that he received them from a family member,” Shanahan said, repeating the testimony he’d just given.

  “The doctor’s wife was angry at him for having an affair with Caroline Maxwell. Would that be fair to say?”

  “I think that would be fair. The doctor told me that he’d wanted to call it off, but he couldn’t bring himself to end it.”

  “So even after his wife discovered the affair and confronted him with the photographic proof, this man went on seeing Caroline?”

  “In my understanding.”

  “Did the doctor’s wife know that he was doing this?”

  “I can’t say what she knew or didn’t know,” he said.

  “Did you ask the doctor’s wife that question?”

  “I haven’t spoken with her,” Shanahan replied.

  “So you made no attempt to interview this woman to determine whether she harbored feelings of jealousy and rage toward Caroline Maxwell for intruding on her marriage?”

  “I f
elt that I’d already intruded on the family enough.”

  “And to be clear, you never considered the possibility that this woman, motivated by jealousy, murdered her husband’s lover, did you?”

  Shanahan blinked. “No, I never considered it. She couldn’t have left—”

  “Couldn’t have left the semen in her body. That’s what you were about to say.”

  Shanahan didn’t answer.

  “That’s what you were about to say, isn’t it, Detective?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. Watching from the gallery, I was elated at his unforced error and her deftness in catching it. Maybe the jurors had seen Presumed Innocent, or read the book.

  Nina stepped back from the podium and turned to the jurors, driving home her point. “But Mr. Maxwell couldn’t have left that semen, either. We know from the lab reports, the ones that were withheld from the defense years ago by Gary Coles, that the semen in Caroline Maxwell’s body didn’t match his blood type.”

  “That’s right. She probably had multiple lovers.”

  Nina circled to establish that this was pure speculation, then said, “You’ve just testified that your belief is that Mr. Maxwell was motivated by jealousy to murder his wife. Wouldn’t the wife of the man whom Caroline Maxwell was sleeping with have had a similar motivation?”

  “Possibly. But that doesn’t mean she acted on it like he did.”

  “How about this other man or men she was supposedly sleeping with? Couldn’t he have killed her?”

  “The circumstantial evidence pointed to the defendant.”

  “But not the physical evidence,” Nina said. “Or at least Gary Coles didn’t think so.”

  Crowder objected and Nina moved on, next getting him to admit that there was no evidence that my father had known Caroline was having an affair, that unlike the doctor’s wife, Lawrence hadn’t hired a private investigator. This was just warmup for the main attack, I knew. We didn’t intend to argue that the jilted wife was the killer. The point was that Shanahan hadn’t bothered to eliminate her as a suspect. “The man confessed,” he finally said. “That’s good enough for me.”

  Now Nina turned to the real focus of our defense. I rested my elbows on my knees, inwardly urging her on. She briskly established the facts of Keith Locke’s attempted murder of my brother, his guilty plea and subsequent imprisonment, and that this crime came as the culmination of a long criminal career. “And despite this extensive criminal history, including sex offenses, you never considered Keith Locke a suspect in Caroline Maxwell’s death.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Instead you focused your energies on trying to find a snitch.”

  Shanahan was growing frustrated. “It seemed logical to me that in all those years, Maxwell might have confessed.”

  “Do you even know if Keith Locke’s blood type matches the semen that was left in Caroline Maxwell’s body, according to the report we have?”

  Shanahan admitted that he hadn’t looked into whether the blood types matched. I allowed myself a fist pump behind the back of the bench in front of me, where the jurors couldn’t see it. My face was as impassive as a choirboy’s.

  “It wouldn’t be difficult to check, right? All you’d have to do is get his Department of Corrections medical file. In fact, I have it right here.” She’d walked to the defense table and picked up a folder. Now she approached the witness stand. “Do you want to look at it, Detective, and see if Keith Locke’s blood type is consistent with him being the person who left that semen in Mrs. Maxwell?”

  “Do I want to?”

  “You don’t really want to do that, do you?” She picked up one of the DA’s exhibits from the clerk’s table. “Here’s the old lab report that Gary Coles didn’t want the defense to see. Here’s Keith Locke’s medical file. I’ve got the page marked for you. Just turn to the red flag. Don’t you want to look, Detective, just to check?”

  At the witness stand, the man’s body language betrayed his deep reluctance and loathing. “Sure, I’ll take a look.”

  Nina offered the medical file as an exhibit, handed a copy to Crowder, gave another to the clerk to be marked, and passed a third to Judge Liu. She retrieved the marked copy and handed it to Shanahan. “Turn to the tabbed page, if you will. What can you tell us?” She turned to the jury. “Do we have a match?”

  He glanced at the exhibit, then set it aside. “All this shows is that Keith Locke’s blood type is the same blood type as the person who left the semen. But that doesn’t prove anything. A sixth of the world has the same blood type.”

  “So you’re telling me it’s just a coincidence?”

  “Sure. You pull up enough possible suspects, sooner or later you’re going to get a match.”

  “And we’ve got one here, don’t we, Detective?”

  “Sure we do,” he said. “Doesn’t mean anything. It’s not DNA.”

  “No, the DNA evidence was lost by the police, wasn’t it, Detective? But if we had that DNA evidence, we could tell to a certainty whether there really was a match, correct?”

  “It would prove that there wasn’t, yes.”

  She came at him and made him admit that he couldn’t know whether the DNA matched or not, driving home her point that Shanahan’s mind was closed to any possibility other than my father being the guilty one. Then she said, “Today in this courtroom is the first time you became aware that Keith Locke could have been the donor of the sperm found in Caroline Maxwell’s body, correct?”

  “Like I said, anyone with the same blood type could have been.”

  “Exactly. Anyone other than Lawrence Maxwell, because we know his blood type didn’t match, right?”

  “Yes,” Shanahan admitted.

  Nina next established that the SFPD had done no investigation into whether Keith Locke might have had an alibi for the murder, that Shanahan had made no attempt to account for his whereabouts at the time of the murder twenty-one years ago. “The reason you didn’t ask the doctor any questions about his son is that you already believed Lawrence Maxwell was guilty, correct?”

  “Let me put it this way. He was my primary suspect. I was trying to keep an open mind. But at that point, and especially after what I’d already learned in that conversation with the doctor, I felt that Maxwell had committed this crime.”

  “Because in your mind, Russell Bell’s story about Mr. Maxwell confessing is all that counts.”

  “I found Bell very credible. And he was genuinely terrified. He told me about a number of attacks that he believed Mr. Maxwell had orchestrated behind bars, one of them resulting in a death. Bell believed he was risking his life talking to me. The fact that he was taking that risk told me that he was telling the truth.”

  “Objection, our stipulation,” Nina was saying as Shanahan spoke over her.

  “Sustained.” Liu addressed the jury. “The jury is to disregard the witness’s last answer.”

  In the gallery I felt murderous myself, my anger multiplied by my powerlessness. I shared a glance with Dot. Shanahan had clearly decided to throw aside the rules and fight dirty, stinging Nina whenever he had the chance.

  “And if Bell is lying, your whole case falls apart, doesn’t it, Detective?”

  He wouldn’t go that far, but she’d made her point. Nina sparred with him for a few more questions, then tightened the leash and ran quickly through Shanahan’s first contact with Russell Bell, frequently referencing the transcript of the preliminary hearing. She established that Bell had approached Shanahan rather than the other way around. She made the detective admit that Bell had failed to divulge key facts, including that Lawrence had drafted the habeas brief that had earned Bell his release from prison. She also had Shanahan admit that Bell had given him no information that had not already been publicized about the murder itself.

  Finally Nina asked, “Does Russell Bell have a source of income?”<
br />
  Payback, I thought. At her use of the present tense, Shanahan’s mouth gave an angry twitch. “Not at present.”

  Nina simply waited. Finally Shanahan said, “When I talked to him he was working as a driver for City Supervisor Eric Gainer.”

  “Did you do anything to determine whether Russell Bell might have had a motive to get Lawrence Maxwell off the street and back in prison?”

  “If he did, he never told me about it.”

  “Did you ask Bell if he’d talked to Maxwell since his release?”

  Shanahan hadn’t asked that question.

  “Why not, Detective? If there was some recent conflict between them, wouldn’t that be important information for evaluating the truthfulness of Bell’s story?”

  “Why don’t you ask Bell yourself?” Shanahan said, biting back. “I’m sure he’d be happy to fill you in.”

  “That’s enough,” Liu told him. “Counsel, are you finished with this witness?”

  Nina consulted her notes. “For now, but I may wish to recall him.”

  “The witness is excused,” Liu said. “We’ll adjourn until nine am.”

  Chapter 17

  We had pizza in the conference room at Nina’s office, Lawrence studying the newspaper, me going through my notes. Teddy had gone home, but Lawrence had hung around, even though I kept urging him to leave. He was nervous about his testimony tomorrow and wanted to practice his direct examination one more time, but I rebuffed him. “Go home to Dot, have a beer, and go to bed,” I said. “It’s time to let tomorrow take care of itself.”

  He seemed to accept this, but first asked if he could borrow my laptop. He wanted to see if a story recapping today’s events was posted on the Chronicle’s website yet. I gave it to him. He clicked a few times, then studied the screen, remaining motionless. At last he looked up. “I thought we’d agreed to trust each other.”

  “I thought so, too.” I met his gaze.

  “Then why am I, just now, learning about this?” He turned the laptop around to show me what he’d been staring at. It was the Chronicle site. Prominently displayed there was a copy of the picture I’d found online, the one with Eric and the two girls. “Teddy told me that you’d found something. I’ve been trying to be patient, trying not to second-guess. I figured that you must have wanted to do your homework before you talked with me about it. But don’t I at least have a right to be consulted before you decide to leak something like this?”