A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  Van called Walker late that night at the Hyatt House to say that Hope had been arrested. Walker went to San Francisco and talked with Honey several times on Wednesday. When she asked him to attend Hope’s bond hearing, Walker arranged to fly into Bakersfield, where Gene Tinch picked him up and drove him to the justice court. Walker was disguised: dark glasses, his hair combed differently, a big cigar.

  Two days after Hope was released on bail, she and Gene Tinch met Walker at the Hilton in San Francisco, where Walker made a long tape recording to support Hope’s story. Later the tape was edited in places, and he made more tapes, between five and twenty altogether. In order to make the entire affair more involved, Gene Tinch found an obscure homicide in the LAPD file, the Crane killing, to substantiate the hired-killer angle, and an elaborate scheme was concocted to lure Tom Masters to a room at the Sheraton-Universal Hotel, where he would be discovered by the police in a room filled with merchandise bought with Bill’s credit cards.

  Back in Los Angeles, at the end of the week, Gene met Walker again at a cocktail lounge at the International Hotel. They revised the plan involving the frame-up of Tom Masters, but on Sunday, March 11, all the plans collapsed when Walker was arrested at the Howard Johnson’s, and charged with killing Bill Ashlock.

  “Mr. Walker, did you kill Mr. Ashlock?” Jay Powell asked.

  “No, I did not.”

  “Did Hope tell you at any time that she killed Ashlock?”

  “No, she did not.”

  The jury never seemed to think she had. “I don’t think she had malice in her, to kill this man,” a juror said later. “And I don’t think she led Walker up there to kill.” Although the jurors were not enchanted with Mrs. Masters, whose references to “live-in help” and “my girl, my maid” had grated on some ears—one juror got up at 4:00 every morning to drive a school bus around dark country roads before reporting to the courthouse at 9:00—Hope’s status was no longer in question. The question was whether the jurors could be convinced of Walker’s guilt, for now there began a startling parade of defense witnesses, establishing a line of evidence that seemed to support Walker’s itinerary.

  Harley Shawn, a service station owner in Earlimart, remembered a man stopping by for gas one night, petting his dog. Mr. Shawn could not positively identify Walker as that man, nor could he specify the exact date. But when a most unlikely defense witness, Jim Brown, was asked about an Arco charge slip that had been taken into police custody, Jim Brown testified that the date on the slip was February 24, 1973. Saturday.

  The owner and cook at the Casa Bella restaurant in L.A. identified Walker as the distinguished-looking man who’d bought a deluxe pizza, mostaccioli and sausage, and a draft beer late one night, between 11:15 and 11:30 P.M., nearly closing time. William J. Richardson wasn’t sure of the date, but he remembered that it was a good sale for so late on a rainy winter night—$5.30, with 6 percent sales tax—and he brought his cash register tape to court with him, with the date “Saturday 2-24-73” written on the tape. Mr. Richardson said he had definitely seen raindrops on the customer’s car, a Lincoln Continental, parked in front, and when John Aldrich, a certified consulting meteorologist, took the stand, he testified that on the night of Saturday, February 24, 1973, traces of rain were reported at the weather station on Van Owen Boulevard, conveniently located just a half mile north of the Casa Bella.

  Martha Sindlinger, a clerk at Lee’s Drugstore on Hollywood Boulevard, said that Walker was the man who’d come into the store shortly before midnight one night in February.

  Robert McRae testified that he’d checked Walker out of the Holiday Inn in Hollywood between six and seven o’clock on Sunday morning, February 25. But he remembered the name as “Tony Tidd.” McRae said he remembered that Tennessee Ernie Ford was also checking out that morning, in something of a rush, and he remembered also that Mr. Tidd, or Mr. Walker, had been with two airline stewardesses.

  A disabled veteran, Joe Mandrelle, who said he spent a lot of time at a fruit stand in Porterville, identified Walker as the man who’d stopped by the stand around ten o’clock one morning—he wasn’t sure just which morning—to buy apples. Mr. Mandrelle remembered telling Mr. Walker, “If you want something really good, those yellow apples are really good.”

  Walked smiled at his witness. “They were, too,” he assured him.

  The letter carrier on Bill Ashlock’s apartment building route was William Suchman, a man so dignified that he called Ashlock “a client.” He identified Walker as the man he’d seen in the hallway of Bill’s building on a Monday—perhaps Monday, February 26—along with a woman, who’d been carrying something.

  Sandi’s testimony left the clear impression that that item might have been a collage, one she’d seen hanging in Bill’s apartment when she’d been there with him. Sandi said she’d seen a rifle in Bill’s place, too. She said Bill had called her three times during the week before he went to the ranch and that, in one conversation, he had told her he intended to move out of Hope’s house. Sandi said they’d made a lunch date for the following Tuesday.

  “He told you he was going to break up with Hope?” Jay Powell asked.

  “Uh huh,” Sandi said, nodding.

  “Did Mr. Ashlock tell you that he had told Hope that he was going to break up with her?”

  “No,” Sandi said. “Bill told me he was. I didn’t say he told Hope he was.”

  Walker was not restricted from approaching any witness except Hope Masters and her mother. So he came up close to the witness, Linda Thornberry, who said she was a waitress in the French Corner dining room at the Hilton Inn at the San Francisco Airport. He looked deeply into her eyes. “Do you see anyone in the courtroom that you have met while being a waitress at that hotel?”

  “I see you, the defendant,” Linda Thornberry said in a low voice.

  She related that she’d served dinner to him, that he’d said his name was William T. Ashlock, but he asked her to call him by the name his friends used, the nickname Dar. That was on Saturday, March 3, the witness said. The next day, Sunday, March 4, she’d seen him sitting with a man and a woman in the Hilton lounge. The man was about six feet, two hundred pounds, medium brown hair, dark suit; he’d told Linda he was a retired police officer. The woman was a slender blond, five foot five or five foot six, her hair pulled back, tired-looking. Linda Thornberry said she had been shown a picture, after that, of Hope Masters. “She looks exactly like the woman I saw in the restaurant,” Linda Thornberry said.

  Beyond her amazing testimony was an area of pain, which Jim Heusdens probed quickly. “How many dates did you have with Mr. Walker?”

  “Three,” she said.

  “And during those dates, did you become intimate with Mr. Walker?”

  “Yes, sir,” the witness said softly.

  “Did you fall in love with Mr. Walker?”

  “I was contemplating it,” she replied.

  She said she thought she had been in love with the man she called Dar, the man who’d told her he was a war correspondent from Australia, although he said he also had a home in Los Angeles … the man who had taken her and her young son out to an ice cream parlor and then had stayed at her apartment … the man who had left her on Tuesday, March 6, saying he would be back. He had not come back, though, and when she had called Los Angeles Information to find him, he could not be found, and she had not seen him in more than ten months since then, until she came to court. As Linda talked, even Jim Heusdens felt bad about it, and when he’d established that the restaurant where she’d seen the woman with Walker was a dark room, candle-lit, he had no further questions. So it was Walker who took the knife, then.

  “You did pay particular attention to that woman, didn’t you?” Walker asked.

  “Yes,” Linda said.

  “Was it because you were personally involved with the defendant?”

  Linda looked at him. “It was because I was a little bit jealous,” she said.

  Jay Powell felt the prison guard was a pa
rticularly good witness for the defense. James Wendel, who had worked as a guard at the Illinois State Prison from 1968 to 1973, identified a picture of Hope Masters as the woman whose picture the inmate G. Daniel Walker had had hanging in his cell.

  Mr. Wendel said he’d met Walker when the prisoner was first admitted, and had seen him, and the picture, every day for eight or nine months. He said he’d mailed letters for Walker, too—some to a nun, Sister Mavis, some to a woman called C. J., some to a woman named Hope Masters. The picture he was shown now was not the same picture, he said, but the woman was the same in both pictures. “Definitely one and the same person,” the guard declared. He remembered the name because it was not a common name and because when he took Walker and the rest of the unit to shop at the prison commissary on Fridays, sometimes Walker didn’t have enough money on account to buy what he wanted. Then Walker would say, “Well, there’s always hope.”

  “What you meant by that, I don’t know,” Wendel told Walker from the witness stand, “but I have been in the penitentiary business, or the confinement business, long enough to know that when a man makes a remark like that, he’s got something behind it. There’s a reason for it.”

  Jim Heusdens scoffed at the witness. “So if Mr. Walker needed more money and said, ‘I have none,’ was he then talking about the nun, Sister Mavis?”

  “He never said he had none,” Wendel insisted.

  “Did Mrs. Masters ever come to the prison?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” Wendel said.

  Heusdens studied the surprise witness. “Are you not a friend of Mr. Walker’s?”

  “On an inmate relationship.”

  “Did you remember all these things from your own recollection, or was it something that Mr. Walker told you about, that refreshed your memory?”

  “I have very good recollection,” the guard declared.

  The testimony was surprising, but even more so was the very appearance of a witness whose testimony revealed Walker’s prison career to the jury. Gene Parker speculated that Walker must have felt that the guard’s testimony about Walker’s friendship with Hope Masters was more important to him than concealing his prior conviction. “I think Walker’s just trying to bring Hopie down with him,” Parker told Jim Brown.

  After the guard’s testimony, Walker took the stand again, to explain that he’d been “furloughed” from prison on December 15, 1972, and that he’d been in a hospital when, in January 1973, “I left the state heading west.” Furthermore, he said, when he left he’d been comfortably equipped with cash and credit cards of his own—department store cards, telephone credit card, an airline credit card, and a commuter pass on Chicago Northwestern Line, a “class pass.”

  As though someone had taken a feather pillow, slit open the case, and shaken it heedlessly into the air, Walker’s testimony swirled through the courtroom. All Jim Heusdens had to do was catch the feathers.

  “You have a witness on the stand who comes along and tells a long story for a day and a half—I think the people have a right to impeach that story at each and every point,” he announced to the court, beginning with Walker’s labeling Marcy Purmal as “my mistress.”

  “All the time that Mr. Walker knew her, he was in custody of police authorities, unless the police authorities in Illinois allow Mr. Walker to have a mistress in prison,” Heusdens said dryly.

  Judge Ginsburg said that while he himself did not understand Walker’s gratuitous remark, he felt that matter was irrelevant. Heusdens shifted tactics.

  “Mr. Walker, have you ever used the name T. O. Wright?”

  “Not that I recall,” Walker said.

  “Did you hear the witness who testified that you checked into the hotel using the name T. O. Wright?”

  “Yes, I heard that witness.”

  “That witness is not telling the truth? Is that your testimony?”

  “No, that’s not my testimony,” Walker said easily.

  Jim Heusdens scowled and waved a hotel registration card in front of his face.

  “Well, the question is, did you check into this hotel using the name T. O. Wright?”

  Jay Powell objected. “It’s argumentative. It’s already been asked and answered. He said he didn’t recall.”

  Heusdens shook his head, like an angry dog. “Is this your handwriting?” he demanded.

  “It certainly looks like it to me,” Walker said casually.

  “Now, did you sign that card in the name of T. O. Wright?”

  “The name is in T. O. Wright, yes.”

  Heusdens held up the small, shiny object, so small it could nestle in a teacup.

  “Mr. Walker, have you ever seen this before?”

  Walker nodded. “Yes, many times.”

  “Where did you see it?”

  “On which occasion?”

  “On the first occasion,” Heusdens said angrily.

  Walker smiled, rather nostalgically. “Hanging over the rather large paunch that my great-grandfather had.”

  “Is that your great-grandfather’s initials?”

  “Yes,” Walker said. “Taylor Owen Wright the Third of Wellston, Ohio.”

  Jim Heusdens smiled, then, too, as he swung the chain back and forth.

  “Did someone in your family then change your name?” he asked.

  “Not that I know of,” the witness said. “It was Taylor Owen Walker.”

  “Taylor Owen Walker?” the prosecutor said loudly. He looked at the jurors and raised his eyebrows. “Well, never mind,” he said to the witness. At least one feather had been caught.

  Gene Tinch tried to capture some more, as he told of his four-hour conversation with Walker on the afternoon of Walker’s arrest in Hollywood. He said Walker had talked of taking Bill Ashlock’s identification permanently. “He told me he intended leaving the country, writing a letter to Ashlock’s place of business, and resigning under the name of Ashlock, and he personally would assume Ashlock’s identification and gain employment through the use of his identification and reputation, and he mentioned going to England.”

  Jay Powell asked Gene whether he’d removed any of Walker’s identification from Hope’s house. Gene said he had not. “Do you recall removing a passport of Mr. Walker’s from Mrs. Masters’s home?” Jay asked. “No, I do not,” Gene said. He also said that he and Hope had never met with Walker in San Francisco, that he had never met with Walker at the Universal Hotel in Los Angeles, that he had never taken any police reports of murder cases from the LAPD files and furnished them to Walker.

  When Gene said there were “probably eight or ten” taped phone conversations between Walker and Hope, Jay told the court that all the defense had been given was a cassette summary of those talks. He said Tom Breslin had told him, “Well, there were a couple of others, but we don’t have them. They were erased, and this is all we have.” Jay Powell maintained that some of the tapes had been edited; specifically, Walker said that in the tape of his call from the Visalia jail, the portion about the contract and watching Hope and putting somebody in the house had been part of another, earlier tape.

  Besides the phone tapes, Walker’s long narrative tape was introduced, over defense protests. “It’s our position that there are at least five tapes,” Powell contended. “I feel that if the court is going to allow one in, without having all five of these tapes, then we are only getting a portion of the story. It’s our position that these tapes were made at the direction of former defendant Masters, her father, and her attorneys, and they requested Mr. Walker to make five tapes, different tapes; that when he made one, they would listen to them and he would change them and make other tapes; and the only way the truth is going to come out is to get all of the tapes in.”

  “You can introduce them if you wish, Mr. Powell,” Ginsburg said. “Or you can show that they exist or that they did exist. But that does not, to my mind, affect the admissibility of this particular tape. This particular tape is admissible.” And so the tape was played to an attentive jury.

/>   A few more defense witnesses appeared, the significance of their testimony not always readable in the faces of the jurors, who were beginning to chafe at the length of the trial, gone into the new year now, and were beginning to bicker among themselves. Ruthe Snelling and Lois Bollinger, who had become friends in their weeks of enforced togetherness, were particularly aggravated by a fellow juror with what they considered an overbearing, boastful manner. Throughout the trial, that woman had bragged incessantly about her domestic accomplishments: sewed all her own clothes; canned all her own vegetables; made all her own jams and jellies, honey, syrups; even dried her own raisins. One afternoon when she came in from lunch complaining that she hadn’t been able to get an omelette, Lois couldn’t resist. “Why didn’t you lay your own eggs?” Lois asked.

  “Don’t talk to your roommate. They could use her against you in court,” Tom Breslin had warned Hope at the Visalia jail. And Vanessa Guillory now appeared to tell the court that Hope had talked of two men who had burst into the ranch house and attacked her, and that when she was free, she’d run outdoors into the orange grove.

  Mary Crane, a doctor’s wife who lived between Porterville and Springville, said that on the murder weekend, either Saturday or Sunday afternoon, around 1:30, she’d seen a dark green foreign car pulling into the ranch road as she was driving past with her children. Another man was opening the gate for the man in the car. Mrs. Crane said she didn’t see either of those men in the courtroom.

  Dolly Hicklin took the stand, but she was not allowed to testify about the murder of her husband by a man named E. E. Taylor. “We are going far afield,” Jim Heusdens said, when Mrs. Hicklin appeared. “The only statement we have got is by Mr. Walker saying that he and Mrs. Masters went to the Taylor residence and now, because Mr. Taylor has been convicted of murder, we are to believe that he also killed Mr. Ashlock.”

  Co-counsel Walker defended Mrs. Hicklin’s appearance. “Through this witness, we are going to show that the person who lived at 1122 North Gordon on February 25, 1973, was a man named Edward Eugene Taylor. The People have questioned the fact that the defendant Walker identified the person at that address, that he took Mrs. Masters to see an Edward Eugene Taylor, and we are now attempting to show that this is the person who lives at that address.”