A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  However, as much as he loved the courtroom—specifically, prosecuting someone in a courtroom—he had submitted his resignation at the D.A.’s office, when his request for a 5 percent pay increase kept getting turned down. He was headed for private practice; he’d still be in court at times, but on the other side. The People of the State of California v. G. Daniel Walker and Hope Masters would be his last hurrah.

  Heusdens had been involved in the case since shortly after Bill’s body was found. He had tried to coax Jim Webb into a late-night polygraph test—“I can get you the best guy from Bakersfield; I can have him here within the hour!”—and, in general, had pursued all possible prosecutorial angles with all possible zeal. Hope had felt the effect of that zeal from the first day she saw him, at the bail hearing, and when she heard that the drugstore clerk had wandered beyond the reach of a subpoena, she asked Tom Breslin whether they couldn’t sue Jim Heusdens for malicious prosecution.

  Tom said they couldn’t. He said there was enough of a thread of rightness laced through the prosecution’s case to justify its moves. “They’ve done everything they can to hinder us,” Tom conceded, “but it’s legal. Maybe not one hundred percent ethical, but not illegal. With a prosecutor, especially one who’s been a cop, everyone’s guilty until they prove themselves innocent. So a lot of prosecutors play that game, especially when you’re in their playground and not your own.”

  The playground, of course, was the key. In Los Angeles, in his years on the police force, Gene Tinch had dealt with over two thousand violent deaths, mostly murders, an average of about thirty-five a month. One a day. In Porterville, filing a homicide under Miscellaneous Crime and having it go unreported in the papers was as unthinkable, say, as a preacher handing out drugs at Sunday worship. Tulare County, and especially the Porterville area, was conservative, rural, and fundamentalist, and when Hope walked into the justice court, she walked on truly alien ground. Whether the controlling attitudes—hers, theirs—were perceived accurately or in a distorted way was not really relevant, once they were perceived at all. Hope’s team had understood this very early, and was doing what little it could to dilute the atmosphere. Some facts could not be altered—the one and a half divorces, the drinking and the grass at the ranch, her rendezvous there with a still-married man—but she could be instructed to keep her cigarettes out of sight, to wear dresses to court, not pants, and, as a general rule, not to wear anything that wasn’t at least ten years old and worth less than twenty dollars. On the day of the bail hearing, Tom Breslin had considered Honey dangerously chic. “If your mother doesn’t own a cloth coat,” he said to Hope, “tell her to buy one!” From the beginning, local newspapers were referring to the ranch house as “luxurious” and “a plush dwelling,” and when Jim Heusdens was told that Ned Nelsen was paid more per diem than Heusdens earned in a month, he said he wasn’t envious, just more determined to win.

  Walker was shackled in handcuffs and leg irons and a waist chain when he was arraigned at the Porterville Justice Court on March 13. Two days later, when Hope and her attorneys drove up, Judge Carter announced that her preliminary hearing and Walker’s were being consolidated, at the request of the prosecutor, and thus would be postponed. Hope wore a severe, high-necked black dress, borrowed; no makeup, with her sandy hair pulled back in a tight, Lizzie Borden bun. Tom Breslin looked at her with an appraising glance. “Not that plain,” he told her. “Nobody would ever believe this guy could be interested in you enough to protect you.” So, the next time, she wore a pink wool dress with a round white collar, also borrowed, her hair falling loose but held back from her forehead with a silver clip, and black patent leather Mary Jane shoes. With Max Factor pancake makeup concealing the circles under her eyes, she looked about fifteen.

  That was on April 2, the day the white Lincoln Continental was found at the Hyatt House Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. Bill Ashlock’s car had already been found, in the parking garage at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. The ticket issued to the little green Triumph showed it had been parked in the hotel garage since February 28, three weeks. As Hope had said about the Hilton’s facilities: “You know it takes forever to park there.”

  “If you smile, you look callous,” Tom Breslin had told her. “If you cry, you look guilty. So just keep a straight face and, above all, don’t look at Walker.” So when Hope heard the clanking sound in the courtroom, a little way down from her at the counsel table, she gazed straight ahead. Walker smiled at Ned Nelsen. “Did you hear, not the patter of little feet, but the tinkle of little chains?” he asked.

  A preliminary hearing was not a trial, Judge Carter explained, but simply that—a hearing of the evidence to determine “probable cause.” Probable cause for the arrest, probable cause that Hope, or Walker, had committed the crime. Because defendants are presumed innocent until proven otherwise, there was no need for the defense to present a case; it was the job of the prosecutor to present a case that established probable cause. Privately, Judge Carter felt that most prosecutors did put on a case that established it.

  Still, the hearing was very much like a trial; witnesses were sworn in, examined, and cross-examined. Voices were raised in legal and emotional conflict. In a way, the hearing was even more dramatic than a trial; with all spectators excluded, the press excluded, witnesses excluded until it was time for their testimony, and without a jury, only the major figures were present at the curved counsel table in front of the judge’s bench. All the drama and the conflict were concentrated.

  Gerald Webb said he had seen Walker at the ranch around 1:30 or 2:00 that Saturday afternoon, in a light-colored Lincoln Continental, and that, later on, he had seen the three people—Hope, Walker, and Ashlock—having trouble with the horse.

  “What did Mrs. Masters specifically say to Mr. Ashlock at the time she had trouble with the horse?” Jim Heusdens asked.

  “Oh, boy,” Gerald Webb said. “She asked him to take the horse, to lead the horse.”

  “Did she ask him, or did she tell him?”

  Ned Nelsen objected quickly. “Calls for a conclusion. Also leading and suggestive.”

  Judge Carter agreed, but Jim Heusdens managed to make his point, anyway, as he asked Gerald to describe Hope’s “reactions and attitudes toward the deceased.”

  “She acted frustrated or a little upset, that somebody wasn’t helping her with the horse.”

  “Could you label it?” Heusdens persisted.

  “It seemed like she was displeased with Mr. Ashlock,” Gerald Webb said, adding that he’d noticed that when she talked to Mr. Walker, “she, like, wanted to make a good impression on him.”

  The witness tried to explain his inability to identify the man he’d seen at the ranch, whom he now knew as Bill Ashlock, when Detective Flores had taken Gerald to Myers Chapel.

  “At that time there was some doubt in my mind because, well, there was other things,” Gerald said. “The stuff in the room bothered my eyes extremely, I mean, it was to the point where my eyes were watering real bad before we left. But the general characteristics of the man at the mortuary, as best I could remember, was the man I saw in the Vega at the ranch, yes.”

  Jay Powell, the public defender for Walker, tried to establish that Gerald’s identification of Ashlock now was impossibly tainted by what he’d subsequently heard from his brother and by pictures he’d seen in the papers. He asked Gerald whether he could disregard what he’d subsequently seen and heard.

  “You are asking me whether I could just put everything else out of my mind?” Gerald asked in surprise.

  “Yes,” Powell said.

  “Well, that’s kind of hard to do,” Gerald complained. “It’s like saying, ‘Don’t think of an elephant.’”

  “So you can’t do it, can you?”

  “I can tell you, in all honesty, that other than the mustache, I thought it was the man. But it really threw me, it really did, because when I saw the man he had dark glasses on and when I saw him in the mortuary he did not.”

  “An
d when you spoke to Detective Flores, you were trying to speak in all honesty too, weren’t you?” Jay Powell asked in an understanding voice.

  “Yes sir, I surely was,” Gerald Webb declared.

  Walker had presented a motion, handwritten on a yellow legal pad, that he be allowed to act as co-counsel in his own defense. Judge Carter considered that motion, and Walker’s later motions, as beautifully written, works of legal art, in fact; not just items to be routinely denied, and considered Walker himself intelligent and good-looking. But he had denied Walker’s motion, leaving him in the hands of Jay Powell.

  Powell was the perfect counterpoint to Jim Heusdens. Where the prosecutor was florid and excitable, Powell was somber, composed, passionless. Heusdens was melodramatic, Powell tight-lipped and precise. Jay Powell wore steel-rimmed glasses, and deviated from his air of scholarly tonelessness in only one respect: every day he came to court wearing a large, floppy Panama hat.

  Hope was not supposed to look at Walker, but she could occasionally peek, and she could tell that Walker, always the soul of sartorial elegance and not bad even in jailhouse denim, detested that Panama hat. Perhaps the hat figured in Walker’s constant criticism of Jay Powell, throughout the preliminary and beyond. “If Mr. Powell’s services are to continue for Walker,” Walker wrote to a judge, “they must be brought up to adequate standards. The problem now becomes the court’s.” He claimed to lack “all confidence and respect” for Powell, labeling Powell’s representation of him as “irresponsible, inadequate, and incompetent.” There was no more striking example of Jay Powell’s imperturbability than his eventual comment, after Walker’s consistent, public criticism, even after Walker had filed a malpractice suit against him, that he and Walker had had a good relationship. “We got along fine,” Jay Powell said stoically.

  Jay Powell was so unassuming that he disliked any mention of his own substantial credentials: a highly rated record at UCLA and a dozen years of legal experience that included a stint in Melvin Belli’s office. So Jim Heusdens mentioned it for him. “Jay used to work for Melvin Belli,” Jim Heusdens said. “But nobody works for Melvin Belli; they carry his books. And I’ve never wanted to carry anybody’s books.”

  When Jay Powell visited Walker in jail, Walker told him he’d known Hope Masters for several years, that he’d had her picture in his cell at the Illinois State Prison, and that he’d written to her from prison.

  The public defender was struck by Walker’s intelligence and poise, his urbane wit. He asked Walker a lot of questions, but not whether he’d killed Bill Ashlock. “I never ask a client, ‘Did you do it?’” Jay Powell said. “I don’t want to know. It’s not important. It has no bearing on my representation of the client; to me, it isn’t relevant, and it’s better if I don’t know. Even if the client said, ‘Yes, I did it,’ how would I know the client is telling the truth? Maybe the client is just taking the rap for someone else.”

  Jim Webb testified that when he’d left the ranch to go to work at six o’clock that Saturday morning, only the green Vega was parked at the house.

  Heusdens reminded him that in one of his statements, Jim had told Detective Flores that a Lincoln Continental was parked at the house Saturday morning.

  “How many statements did you give to Mr. Flores?” the prosecutor demanded.

  “Oh, I couldn’t say,” Jim replied, and when Heusdens whipped out a copy of the first statement Jim had given, in the predawn darkness on February 28, Jim said he didn’t recall giving it, at least not the part about a Lincoln Continental on Saturday morning. “The first time I seen the Lincoln was Saturday afternoon when I came home,” Jim testified. He said he’d seen both cars, the Lincoln and the Vega, about 9:30 Saturday night and again on Sunday morning early, around 6:00.

  But when Jay Powell cross-examined—“Mr. Webb, can you swear that from nine thirty Saturday night until six A.M. Sunday morning, neither the Lincoln nor the Chevrolet Vega were moved?”—Jim Webb said he could not.

  Teresa Webb said she’d seen both cars parked at the house Saturday night—she said it was around eleven P.M.—and that on Sunday morning around nine, when she and the children drove by the main house, she’d seen only the green Vega, not the Lincoln.

  Hope was only mildly annoyed at the prosecution’s prehearing efforts to link her with Jim Webb—“Oh, what a joke,” she said coolly. “A duller human being I’ve never met”—but she was genuinely irked by the testimony of Officer Stien of the Beverly Hills police.

  She had never felt comfortable talking to Stien and his partner the night they came to her mother’s house to listen to her story. She thought they were both too young to possibly comprehend, and she thought Stien, in particular, looked like a freshman jock at USC. “Excruciatingly young,” Hope declared. “I wanted to talk to a grown-up person.” She still felt that way, as she listened to Stien’s testimony about the story Hope had told that evening, a story that he admitted “was not, in effect, a coherent, chronological account of what had occurred at the ranch.”

  “Did she appear to be upset?” Tom Breslin asked.

  “Yes,” Stien said.

  “Did she appear to be frightened?”

  “Yes.”

  Jim Heusdens picked up on the question. “You say that she appeared frightened. Do you believe she was frightened?”

  “No,” Stien said.

  Stien kept saying “supposedly,” which made Hope even madder. She was awakened abruptly “by someone trying to force a gun, or something that was supposedly a gun, in her mouth and about her face.” “Then, supposedly, she was raped. Then he supposedly got very perverted.” Stien said Hope Masters had told him that “this individual” had told her he was hired by a Tom Masters, that “the individual” took pictures of her, put on rubber surgical gloves, and wiped off everything he had possibly touched. He untied her, and they talked till daylight, when he tied her up again and left.

  “Did Mrs. Masters make any statement to you about why this person did not kill her?”

  “She said to me that this individual stated that he kind of liked her.”

  Jim Heusdens smiled.

  Stien said that Hope had said that then “an individual” came to the ranch—“supposedly it was a Taylor or Tyler”—heard her screaming, entered the house, and untied her. At Hope’s request, Taylor moved Bill’s body and then drove her home, where she received phone calls from “this individual that was up to the ranch prior, and he told her not to say anything, that if she said anything, her life and her immediate family’s lives would be in danger.”

  “Did she tell you why Taylor came up to the ranch?”

  Stien said Hope had said Taylor came to take advertising pictures.

  “Did she tell you what time Mr. Taylor arrived?”

  “I can’t recall. I believe it was early in the morning, probably around nine or ten o’clock.”

  “Did she ever mention Mr. Taylor being up there on Saturday?”

  “No,” Stien said.

  Jim Heusdens leaned across the counsel table and spoke firmly to the witness.

  “Did you believe Mrs. Masters’s story that she was telling you at the time she was telling it to you?”

  “No,” Stien said.

  At the lunch break, Jay Powell gave Ned Nelsen an envelope with Hope’s name on it. Inside, Hope found a cartoon clipped from a newspaper—two little naked kewpie dolls, a boy and a girl, the girl making a fuss, the boy smiling patiently. The caption read: “LOVE IS … taking a stroll while she lets off steam.”

  Elisa Arenas smiled at Hope as she told of Hope’s trip to the hospital. She said the doctor hadn’t said much, because Hope was doing all the talking, and when Hope talked to Arenas, she told her that two men had come to the house and murdered her boyfriend, then both of them, or maybe just one of them, had tied her up and raped her.

  “Are you certain she said two men?” Heusdens asked.

  “That’s right,” Elisa Arenas said.

  Dr. Wong said he had seen n
o bruises when he examined Hope, but he had seen two small areas of what appeared to be adhesive tape marks, darkened with dirt.

  “Was there anything to confirm that she had been raped?” Jay Powell asked.

  “There is no such thing to confirm one way or the other,” the doctor asserted.

  “Was there any evidence of trauma?”

  “There was no evidence of trauma,” the doctor said. When asked if he recognized her now, in court, he said he didn’t, because in court she was smiling at him, and when he saw her, she was not smiling.

  The hearing, which had been planned for two days, stretched into a week, and Judge Carter announced the proceedings would be transferred to City Hall, over on Main Street, because the justice court was needed for other cases. Jim Heusdens pointed out that security at City Hall was very poor—“There are at least six exits”—and requested that, in the new surroundings, Walker’s shackles be put back on.

  Judge Carter had always been uneasy about the matter of shackles and chains. As a compassionate man, he felt uncomfortable about draping another man in irons, but as a practical man, he felt uncomfortable about the consequences of freeing him entirely. When he’d come to a sort of compromise, and done away with the full machinery of irons, he’d worried about it, and he’d mentioned it to Jay Powell. “I have this feeling, and I hope you have it too, that you should never turn your back on him,” Judge Carter told the lawyer. “Do you realize that?”

  “I realize it,” Jay Powell replied.

  When Judge Carter had warned the deputies, too—“Don’t get too friendly with him”—they took his advice, especially Allen Pundt, one of the marshals who escorted Walker in and out of the courtroom.

  “What did you say your name was?” Walker asked Marshal Pundt one day, in a friendly, conversational tone, as they walked through the narrow corridor to the car that would take Walker back to jail.

  “I didn’t say,” Allen Pundt said crisply.

  He didn’t say anymore, and Walker shook his head, with a rueful chuckle.