A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  On April 30, Ned Nelsen and Tom Breslin, on behalf of Hope Masters, and Jay Powell, on behalf of G. Daniel Walker, moved in superior court that the charges against their respective clients be dismissed on grounds of insufficient evidence. Powell also argued that his client had been arrested “illegally and unconstitutionally,” and Walker himself presented seven handwritten motions, including a renewed motion that he be appointed co-counsel and that, as co-counsel, he be granted “tools of the trade.” Walker cited a 1969 case in which a man named Richardson, accused of shooting a policeman in Long Beach, had been named as his own co-counsel and subsequently provided with a typewriter, a telephone, law books, and a valet-runner to file his motions. Walker said he was willing to waive the valet, but he needed everything else, including a telephone, typewriter, white bond typing paper, carbon paper, envelopes, stamps, and the use of the court’s law library. He asked for his money back—$186.33—so he could buy some law books and periodicals that were unavailable in Tulare County, including the most recent volume of the Criminal Law Reporters, with its weekly supplement published in Washington, D.C. He said he was a former subscriber. He asked for a battery of tests to be run, including hair examination, tape examination, bullet fragments examination, and fingerprint work. He estimated the cost of these tests would range from $12,469.50 to $40,936.50. He asked for a number of out-of-county subpoenas to be issued to persons in London, Australia, and Dusseldorf, Germany.

  Judge Jay R. Ballantyne denied the motions to dismiss, but he ruled that Walker could act as co-counsel and be given the tools of the trade. By the time of the pretrial hearing, when both defendants pleaded not guilty, Walker had another stack of motions prepared, including two that were particularly intriguing. He argued that the Tulare courts had no jurisdiction in the case at all, because it had not been proven that Springville was in Tulare County, and he presented a motion, apparently based on Gerald Webb’s problem at Myers Chapel, that “The People have failed to show, in ten volumes of preliminary hearings, that William T. Ashlock is dead.” Also by that time—May 14—Walker had been given two cells, one with a picnic table moved in for his work space; and the women trustees in their section of the Visalia jail had made him a quilt.

  “I may be a little nuts in my own way, but I’m not violent,” Hope had told Tom Breslin, and as the days and weeks passed, deepening into early summer, and the trial was postponed again, her family problems heightened, and Hope felt she was going more than a little nuts.

  During the preliminary, Keith had stayed with Sharon and Bill Pierce, the couple Hope had willed her children to in the note she scribbled in her mother’s kitchen. A boy had teased Keith at school—“I hear your mother’s a jailbird”—and Keith was getting into fights, so the Pierces had let Keith stay home from school, and Sharon Pierce enrolled Hope in a prayer chain.

  Now Keith refused to return to school, and Hope didn’t have the strength, or the will, to force him. She had been cut by the cruelty herself; one night, when Michael Abbott took her to dinner to get her mind off things, they’d gone to a restaurant she knew well and felt comfortable in. When the man playing the piano saw her, he played “As Time Goes By,” then struck a couple of smashing chords, to get everyone’s attention. “How does it feel to be out of the slammer?” he called to Hope across the crowded room.

  Honey and Van and Hope quarreled most of the time. Hope resented their telling her what she should have done, what she should have said, and how everything she did and said they would have done and said differently. Hope was bitter about Van’s refusal to use his legal influence to help her. When Judge Ballantyne denied the motion to dismiss, Tom and Ned had appealed to the Fifth Appellate Court. When they lost on appeal, Hope’s last chance lay in a hearing before the state supreme court. Tom and Ned drew up a long petition for the hearing, citing four reasons: that there was no reasonable or probable cause to believe that the defendant had committed the crime; that there was no evidence to establish that the defendant had committed the crime of murder; that evidence showed that she had been kidnaped by the co-defendant at gunpoint; and that the inconsistencies in her statements did not supply proof of the elements of the crime with which she was charged.

  Even for Ned Nelsen, a supreme court hearing was not a cinch to get, and Ned had asked Van to intercede. Specifically, Ned asked Van to ask William French Smith, one of Van’s law partners, who was well-connected in Sacramento, to help her get a hearing. When Van refused, Hope screamed. “I’m only asking for a hearing, goddamnit! I’m not asking you to do anything illegal. I’m just asking you to help me.” The hearing was not granted.

  For a brief time, on the day of the bail hearing—“My daughter is not well. I fear for her”—it had appeared that danger might, at last, have forged stronger links of understanding and affection among the members of the family. But it did not. The emotional rapport momentarily achieved in the justice court had evaporated in the diffused air of Beverly Hills, and Hope and Van had retreated to their customary position, which was, most of the time, an adversary position, too far out of reach for understanding. When Van heard Walker’s taped suggestion that Hope’s lawyers meet him in Rhodesia, “He hit the ceiling,” Hope told Michael angrily. “No way is he going to pay to send my attorneys to Rhodesia. And all the while my mother’s personal allowance, not including upkeep on her car and lunches at the club, is three thousand a month.”

  Van did not speak of his own problems to Hope or, if he did, she considered them minimal compared to the pressures on her. But, as early as March 2, when she was still behind bars, when Van and Honey were on their way to Porterville, an interoffice memo had been left on Van’s desk, signed by the firm’s director of administration. The memo began by expressing sympathy and deep concern for the unfortunate situation involving Van’s daughter; then, in a longer paragraph, the director passed along some thoughts that had been expressed to him by several of the partners in the Firm—Van’s Firm always referred to itself in caps.

  “In view of the prominence of the Firm and of the fact that the media have already identified the Firm by name, and you as a senior partner in the Firm, the manner in which the case is handled, and by whom, has a direct bearing on the reputation, not only of yourself, but also of the Firm. With this in mind, the partners feel that it is your responsibility to the Firm to see to it that the very best lawyer or lawyers available are hired to represent Hope. The partners believe you will agree that your responsibility to the Firm, as its senior lawyer and as a person identifiable (and in fact already identified in the newspapers, etc.) with the Firm, is such as to require that the charges against Hope be handled in the most delicate way, and not turned over to a criminal lawyer who might be competent to handle only ordinary criminal cases.”

  When he returned to his office and found the memo, Van offered to submit his resignation. His offer was not accepted, but Van traced the “several partners” who had passed along their thoughts, and the episode left a permanent imprint.

  Van’s own journal reflected a melancholy awareness of the troubled family relationship. On March 15, the day the preliminary hearing was postponed: “Hopie said at lunch that the way I handled things was in some way responsible for her present predicament. I sulked and am still sulking. Seems to me fruitless to go back over things done that cannot now be undone.” Another day: “Nothing significant, except that Hopie came by and she and I had a pretty good battle going, re various problems.” Van’s relief matched Hope’s on the Saturday she went back up to the Drive. “I played golf. Honey played cards. Hopie took her car and all three children and went home. Thank God!”

  Up on the Drive, Keith had become a rebellious truant; Hope Elizabeth was a model student at school but at home would often throw herself on the floor and scream for hours, so long and so loud that neighbors, not just next door but way up and down the block, would call to ask what the matter was. When Hope, rotating between depression and extreme anxiety, finally asked a psychiatrist what the matter
was with everybody, he told her he couldn’t treat her alone, that everybody’s problems—three generations of interwoven problems—were so tight they couldn’t be picked apart. On the simplest level, he explained, one child might be manifesting the others’ anxieties. He talked about her relationship with Honey and with Van and the preexisting frustrations and resentments. “What this affair has done,” Dr. Elstead told Hope, “has been to take everybody’s small problems and blow them out of all proportion, magnifying them so that what normally could be settled at home now becomes a job for a doctor.” Hope thought that made sense; she managed to transfer five thousand dollars from one of her trust funds and gave it to the psychiatrist in the form of a cashier’s check, upfront payment to guarantee a span of treatment for herself and the kids, and when her parents found that out, they were displeased.

  One of Hope’s resentments stemmed from the attitude she felt Honey and Van displayed, the attitude that they, as much as she, were the victims. Hope had seen the attitude confirmed by the gifts that poured in from the time the news broke—flowers and candy and sympathetic notes, almost exclusively addressed to Honey and Van. “My heart aches for you two darling people.…” Honey and Van were invited to dinner, for weekends, to “a place which is secluded and quiet, where you’d need to do nothing but watch the boats go by.” Honey shared all the correspondence with Hope, though it might have been better if she had not, especially the note addressed to “Very dear Honey and Van” with an enclosed quotation: “When our children are little, they trod upon our feet; and when they are grown, they trod upon our hearts.”

  On June 19, a new trial date was set—September 4—to allow time for hearings on Walker’s two major motions, one to suppress the evidence accumulated in the wake of his arrest, and the other to quash the arrest warrant itself.

  Walker based his motion to suppress on a federal ruling in the Wong Sun case, a judicial concept colorfully referred to as “the fruit of the poisoned tree.” Walker spelled it out: “What Begins Ill Can Never Be Anything but Evil and Illegal.” Essentially, his argument was that the letter to Marcy, which was the only means the authorities had to link Walker with the Ashlock affair, had been illegally intercepted by the Illinois authorities, and that everything following that illegal act—the identification of Taylor as Walker, his arrest, and the seizure of all the incriminating evidence—was therefore illegal and invalid.

  The motion to suppress the arrest warrant was also described: “When a Lie Weaves a Garment of Pure Falsehood, the People Must Shed or Wear It.”

  In that section, Walker insisted the police had entered and searched Room 609 at Howard Johnson’s illegally, before his arrest, and he cited Stoner v. California, 1964: “No less than the tenant of a house, or the occupant of a room in a boarding house … a guest in a hotel room is entitled to constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

  In his fifty-two-page motion, Walker poked a good deal of extraneous fun, calling the police “the occupation forces” and noting that an FBI agent had stood by the window for several hours “without even looking under the bed … the most common of hiding places down through the years.” He scoffed at Jim Brown’s inventory of property, which, Walker pointed out, listed a can of shaving cream but no razor—“Would a man have shaving cream and no means to use it?”—and a can of Alberto VO5 hairspray but no comb or brush. “The Court can hardly fail to take judicial notice of Defendant Walker’s hair, its length and amount, and draw a reasonable inference it did not attain such length and proportions in custody, therefore, would it be reasonable to assume a man would have nothing to comb or shape his hair with in his room?” Walker listed the clothes he was wearing at the time of his arrest: “one leather coat with hand lacing and three buttons down front; one blue/white checked and/or pattern shirt with collar, buttons down front, buttons at cuffs, buttons on breast pockets; one white turtleneck sweater with long sleeves; one pair of blue denim bellbottom pants; one white belt with red trim in center around it (in loops on pants); one pair of blue with white trim bikini jockey shorts; one pair of navy blue Supphose to-the-knee socks; one locker key for L.A. International Airport locker concealed in elastic top of sock on right leg; one pair of eight-inch boots with inside zipper, size 10B”—and he pointed out that the police list did not include those clothes. “One must assume from the People’s inventory that Walker was arrested nude.”

  Finally, Walker noted that the search warrant for the Thunderbird was issued on the basis of three police affidavits—one signed, two orally sworn—and that the resulting inventory had not been transcribed and certified by an official court reporter.

  All the arguments meshed, of course. If the arrest were illegal, then the warrant would inevitably be defective; if the car keys found in the Thunderbird were illegally seized, then the car that those keys unlocked—the Impala at the San Francisco Airport—was illegally searched, too. Everything, finally, harked back to the letter; once the poisoned tree began to bloom, there was no stopping the proliferation of its fruit.

  Jim Heusdens always felt that one person could have stopped the tree from bearing; could, in fact, have chopped it down to a ragged stump. Marcy Purmal could have been subpoenaed at the hearing, to testify under oath that her mail had not been illegally seized and that she had turned Walker’s missives over to the Illinois authorities voluntarily, if with some reluctance. Even without Marcy, Jim Heusdens said he would have put up one hell of an argument—for example, on the search of the hotel room business. “How can the search of a hotel room be unlawful when the room is rented unlawfully, on a stolen credit card?” he fumed. “The guy isn’t the legal tenant; he’s not going to pay the bill. He’s just a goddamned trespasser!”

  But it didn’t matter, then, what Jim Heusdens would have done. He had resigned from the D.A.’s office at the start of the summer and was practicing law on Morton Street in Porterville, just down from the justice court. Another deputy D.A., Joseph Haley, had been put in charge of the action. But that was after Heusdens’s triumph at the preliminary and his subsequent spadework in the late spring, when he had joined Gene Parker and Jim Brown on a trip to the Midwest.

  Parker and Brown always considered it the high point of their travels, when they stepped off the plane at O’Hare and saw Bob Swalwell in his three-piece dark blue suit, leaning against a wall in the airport terminal, waiting for them. They had an evening together—good food, good wine, and a lot of good cop talk—and the next day the three detectives, with Jim Heusdens, visited Marcy Purmal. Although Marcy’s attorney, George Murtagh, had assured them she would cooperate with them, Brown and Parker got the feeling she’d just as soon they hadn’t come by.

  Marcy said she’d never heard the names Taylor Wright, Larry Burbage, Dick Miller, Richard Crane, Bill Ashlock, or Hope Masters before the investigation began. She said that Walker had never mentioned an advertising agency to her and that, as far as she knew, he never had any connections on the West Coast, though she did seem to remember Walker talking, once, about the TV commercial character, “Captain Crunch,” which he said he had created or helped create or something, and she thought Walker might have been sent to California on advertising business, possibly in 1968.

  When Marcy was questioned about parties in Walker’s hospital room, she said several attorneys had visited him there because they were interested in penal reform, but she couldn’t recall any parties. When Marcy was shown a set of photographs, she identified Walker. She identified Hope Masters as the woman whose picture Marcy had received in a letter. She denied knowing Bill Ashlock, except for having heard his name in the letter, but both Brown and Parker noted that Marcy lingered over Bill’s photograph with a broad smile on her face.

  At the Illinois State Prison, they found thirty cardboard boxes Walker had abandoned.

  Jim Brown was not allowed to take his camera inside the prison so he stood on the steps outside and took pictures of the door. Inside, they talked to a number of people, trying to
find out if Walker had indeed had Hope Masters’s picture when he resided there.

  In Aurora, they visited Robert Pietrusiak, who identified, from photographs, many of his stolen items, including his camera, his tape recorder, and a pair of scissors. Robert and Catherine Pietrusiak identified Walker’s picture and, in Michigan, so did Taylor Wright.

  The low point of their travels came when they found an airline stewardess who identified Walker as one of her Colorado passengers. She remembered him well, because bad weather had delayed takeoff for an hour and a half, and he’d left the plane to get drinks for himself, for the stewardess, and for the woman he was traveling with, whom the stewardess remembered as a beautiful, tall blond. They were never able to identify or locate the woman whom they thought had traveled with Walker to Albuquerque. “Maybe she’s just bones out in the desert somewhere by now,” Brown told Parker.

  Back in Visalia, they discussed Walker’s activities with him. He told them they were still missing a car, a Mercedes, and once he told them, with a smile, “You’re overkilling your prey.” He never identified that woman, though he did give them a lot of tips. “He’s teaching us about law, about techniques of interrogation, techniques of investigation, collecting evidence, and preserving evidence, just by our watching him and listening to him,” Parker told Brown. “I’ve learned more from him in a couple of months than I learned in the ten years prior.”

  Jim Brown, too, found Walker friendly and witty, a most interesting man. Jim was often assigned to escort Walker on his regular visits to the law library, two hours every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and when Walker told Jim he liked jelly beans, Jim began bringing in bags of jelly beans for him, usually purple.

  Still, Jim was always prepared. He had shot at someone only once in his life, in the middle of a trailer court, ringed by onlookers, when a man he was chasing suddenly whirled and fired three shots at Jim. “The third shot dug dirt out from under my toes,” Jim recalled. “But the first two, I didn’t know where they went, and those were the ones I worried about. I was lookin’ around to see if I’d been hit. Well, he was using a three fifty-seven Magnum, which you can shoot through a car engine with. And if I’d been hit, why man, I’d have known it.”