The Onion Field

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Then he found himself testifying. Telling it again. Pointing to the exact places where it all happened.

  “Was there any talking at that point?” asked Schulman.

  “Yes, that’s when he made the statement about the Little Lindbergh Law,” said Karl, his soft husky voice disappearing in the open air.

  “I don’t know if the jurors can hear you. What took place then?”

  “When Powell moved to that position of the stake, he had the gun pointed at about a forty-five degree angle and this is when he said, ‘We told you we were going to let you go, but have you ever heard of the Little Lindbergh law?’ ”

  “What did Campbell say?”

  “He said yes.”

  “What did Powell then do?”

  “Powell shot him.”

  “How did he do that?”

  “He raised the pistol to shoulder height and he fired it.”

  It was perhaps the sixth time Karl had testified to this and when it was the defense counsel’s turn John Moore said, “Would you walk down to the spot where you looked back, sir, and look over your left shoulder in the way you did?”

  “Do you want him to run down the road, Mr. Moore?” asked Schulman sardonically.

  “If there is an objection, I would like to hear it,” Moore snapped back. Then to Karl, “Just before you got out of the car, Officer, you were told to freeze, were you not?”

  “No. I may have been, but I don’t recall it.”

  “Well, you didn’t go over your notes today?”

  “I would like the record to reflect, your Honor,” interrupted Schulman, “that I have gone over the record fairly thoroughly and I don’t recall this witness at any time testifying that Powell told him to freeze or anything of that nature.”

  “At this time I cite the district attorney for misconduct for stating what he thinks the evidence shows.”

  “I object to those remarks also,” said Ray Smith.

  “This is in regard to a question by Mr. Moore in a sarcastic manner that ‘You haven’t looked at your notes today,” Schulman retorted.

  “I will cite the district attorney a second time for misconduct for saying I asked the question in a sarcastic manner!” said Moore.

  “All right. The objections and each of them are sustained,” said the judge, sitting in a folding chair at a folding table. “The jury is admonished to disregard the colloquy between all counsel.”

  “When you ran twenty feet, you turned and looked back over your left shoulder, didn’t you?” asked Attorney Smith on cross examination.

  “Yes.”

  “You were going full force?”

  “I slowed some.”

  “Now is it your testimony that Officer Campbell fell backward or forward when he received the first shot from Powell?”

  “He went down and he appeared to fall more backward. He went more backward than he went straight down.”

  “And would you say that when he fell down, Officer Hettinger, that he was lying six feet two inches long on the ground? Or was he more or less fallen in a heap?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “And before he hit the ground you were gone, isn’t that right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I have no further questions.”

  The judge was then to grant another defense motion: to see the onion field at night, the way it might have been on another night. So at 9:30 P.M. Karl Hettinger stood by the road with Pierce Brooks, beside the lighted county bus. He looked across the darkness toward Wheeler Ridge and then east and north toward the mountains far far on the horizon. The wind was not howling and it was not cold this night, still he shivered, while the sweat trickled down his chest and back and ribs.

  He thought about his new daughter and thought about Helen and he thought about putting brake shoes on his car. He thought about anything but what was creeping into his mind. He beat it back and thought about the stomach cramps which had been plaguing him of late. But a thought stole into his mind, so he turned from the fields and looked into the crowded bus. The judge and jurors were sitting quietly. The defendants were in separate darkened cars, handcuffed, under heavy guard. Suddenly Karl began hurting badly, a twisting pounding hurt in the pit of the stomach. He feared a diarrhea attack. They waited several minutes in the quiet, lonely dark after the judge ordered the lights turned out on the bus.

  Finally, the judge said: “Let the record show that it is now about six minutes after ten. The jurors have remained in the bus and the lights have been out, and we are going to take our adjournment at this time until 9:30 A.M. on Monday, when we will reconvene in Department 104 of the Superior Court.”

  When the trial resumed in Los Angeles after the sojourn to the onion field the defense tried new motions.

  “Your Honor,” said John Moore that morning, “the evidence here would show that this witness, Sergeant Brooks, without the permission of the public defender has interviewed this defendant about this case, and has so destroyed this defendant’s confidence in the public defender at least for a period of time, that he would not cooperate with the public defender. As long as there is an attorney on the record, I say, in my belief, the police officer should not be able to talk to him.”

  “Mr. Moore, if the law required that I notify you, I would do so,” Brooks would reply. “And if you or anybody from your office had ever called and asked me not to see Gregory Powell on any occasion I would not have done so. I did not force myself on him. He asked me to see him. Even in your presence he asked me and you did not object.”

  Attorney Ray Smith once more offered his old motion.

  “I want the record to show that the defendant Smith is asking your Honor for an advised verdict of not guilty for the reason and on the basis that the evidence thus far introduced in this case fails as a matter of law to show that the offense alleged in this information occurred within the jurisdictional territory of Los Angeles County.”

  Pierce Brooks often sat at the counsel table and glanced absently at the photo exhibits, at the open eyes of Ian Campbell lying on his back on the stretcher, his chest soaked with blood and the trickles of blood running from his upper lip down into his ears. Mostly the detective looked at the opened eyes of the dead policeman. The eyes hadn’t yet clouded when the photos were taken. Brooks thought Ian looked just a little sleepy and serious, perhaps even sorrowful.

  The detective stared at the picture and thought of the thousands of dead bodies he had seen, some with eyes open, some closed, some with one open and one closed. He had never seen the killer’s face in a dead man’s eye as the old stories had promised. But he knew whose image would show sharpest if such a thing were possible. Then he turned and glanced at the two killers: Gregory Powell, sitting tense and straight, head swiveling on that long neck, looking toward the jury every few moments to catch their reaction to testimony. Brooks glared at Jimmy Smith, sitting hangdog as usual, lip pouting, forehead permanently wrinkled despite his youth, as though he lived in pain. Brooks despised Jimmy Smith, and wondered how the cowering bully felt at the last when he had a cop helpless at his feet. Yes, Powell was a dead man. The battle was over. He had yielded to the detective. Brooks felt nothing toward him now. But Jimmy Smith, that was another matter.

  The prosecution used multicolored arrows and markers to describe the death scene and escape route of Karl Hettinger. The exact place of Ian’s murder was to be known as the place marked by the red arrow. The red arrow was repeated so often it became a litany that Pierce Brooks would never forget. And when it came time to use markers on the blackboard to describe the defendants’ and officers’ positions, Pierce Brooks smiled to himself and was tempted to use a yellow marker for the coward Jimmy Smith, but had too much reverence for the court and law to be anything but respectfully serious.

  Finally on Monday, August 19, defendant Jimmy Smith took the stand and was cross examined by Marshall Schulman.

  “Was there any conversation between you and Gregory Powell, whispered
or otherwise, that let you know that he was going to shoot one of the officers or both of them?”

  The answer, Pierce Brooks was to say, was pure Jimmy Smith in its evasiveness.

  “In my mind, no sir. I’m positive that I had no thought in my mind. Right now. That I can remember.”

  “And you never worked the farms around that area of the Maricopa cutoff?” asked Schulman.

  “I’m almost sure I haven’t. I swamped some spuds once down there and I also picked cotton goin the other way. But I never remember workin close to the mountains. Maybe I did, but I don’t remember it.”

  Then Marshall Schulman read a disjointed transcription taken from a detective who was present the night of Jimmy’s capture. It was taken by a stenographer and it was read by Schulman verbatim in the form of a question. The statement was difficult to follow, at times incoherent, and Pierce Brooks looked at Jimmy Smith and imagined the absolute fear that was on him that night when he huddled there handcuffed, a blanket over his naked shoulders, his feet bloody and painful, while he was interrogated, not for his usual five-dollar shoplift, but for the murder of a cop. He could easily imagine Jimmy babbling incoherently, and he could understand how a man like Jimmy Smith could have survived his wretched life by never giving anything but an indirect evasive reply to anything anyone ever asked of him.

  Brooks could understand, but that was all. He despised the lying coward too much for a quantum leap into pity. Jimmy had blurted things to the Bakersfield detectives:

  “When I hit the county jail, I’m gonna make them give me … give me … I know that I … A psychiatrist thing, you know, and I bet you he can tell, you know, that I, you know … that I, you know … that I’m not mental, that I couldn’t do it, you know, do that. I hope I didn’t do it. I might do it, you know, in a pinch, or maybe if I was shoved into it, or something, but I mean, as far as just outright, you know, just kill a man, you know. Was there anything else you wanna know?”

  The jury listened in rapt attention as the words on the transcription tumbled brokenly:

  “I don’t know whether … maybe not, maybe Powell will tell you. Maybe … man, he’s sure to think, you know, about that. You know what? It’s just, you know, outright cold blooded, you know? This takes a lot of … I don’t know what this is. He’s gotta be a nut, man, you know, just to, for no reason … If you are gonna attack me, or just to cold blooded kill … How could I do that? Could you do that? I mean, you maybe could. I mean, there’s no motive other than maybe to escape or somethin. Well, uh, this don’t … I don’t know. Maybe it was doin time, or somethin that made me, could build myself up to somethin, or … or, if I thought I could escape the Death Row, or somethin, you know? But, how could a guy in this cold blooded … and this was a simple matter, takin the guys back in the hills and dumpin em. This is … this just can’t be done, you know?”

  “What were you doing,” asked Schulman finally, “when Gregory made the statement: ‘Jimmy, what the hell are you doing? The guy is getting away’?”

  “As far as I know, I was just standin there like an idiot because I was in shock.”

  “You were shooting into a man’s body, weren’t you?”

  “I never saw his body. I never saw … I never looked …”

  “Mr. Smith, describe the twitching motion that you saw on that body on the ground.”

  “I either saw an arm or a shoulder … I don’t know which it was. I couldn’t even determine the color … but it seemed to me … I even had dreams about it, that it was … periodically, just a few times it was done like … or it was movin. I don’t know. I can’t even describe it.”

  “You say you have dreams about this coat jumping?”

  “When I first arrived in here at night I was dreamin about it. I couldn’t understand it, why I kept thinkin about this.”

  “Did you see the coat jumping?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, I guess I did see it. I thought I saw it, anyway. I’m pretty sure I did.”

  “You never mentioned the four bullets in the body until March 13, when you corrected everything. That’s when Sergeant Brooks told you there were four bullets in the body.”

  “Yes sir. That made me remember. Him tellin me.”

  “Remember?”

  “Yes it did. Then I remembered hearin those other shots!”

  Now Marshall Schulman could look at the sunken cheeks and skull-like face and flat blue eyes of Gregory Powell and whisper to Pierce Brooks: “Old death’s head ain’t got a chance, and neither does his partner now.”

  At last, Brooks could look at Jimmy Smith and no longer be troubled by the thought of him hunting Karl Hettinger, quartering his victim with the little car and the lights, hunting him down like a wolf.

  The defenders of Gregory Powell knew that if Jimmy Smith’s fate was uncertain, their client’s position was perilous indeed. And their client realized it and permitted the groundwork for a defense of diminished capacity if not outright insanity.

  A neurosurgeon from Vacaville was called who had performed a craniotomy on Greg on September 14, 1961, during his last prison term.

  “This patient gave a history upon coming into the institution of having had a head injury in childhood,” testified the doctor. “It is the routine at the California Medical Facility to subject such a patient to neurological screening. In other words, to determine whether there is, in fact, any injury or other disease of the nervous system in such a person. This involves performance of X rays of the skull, brain wave tests, or electroencephalograms, and neurologic examination. In this particular case, an area of calcification was seen in the right fronto-temporal region.”

  “Roughly the right temple?” asked Moore.

  “Yes sir. As I say, this area of calcification was revealed on X ray, and its exact nature could not be determined in spite of a number of different tests, so after obtaining opinions from other neurosurgeons and X ray specialists, it was concluded that the only way we could be certain that this calcification was not caused by a brain tumor was by exploratory surgery.”

  “Now, Doctor, what does calcification mean?”

  “It is a deposition of calcium within the tissues.”

  “Where does it come from, if you know?”

  “Well, the reasons for this are not fully known. It may occur without any known injury or disease. There may be areas of very dense calcification in the brain without apparent adverse effects. A possibility, and the thing that led to surgery here, is that certain types of brain tumors may form calcium within their substance.”

  “Now it is my understanding that atrophy, the shrinkage or wasting of the brain, can come from a trauma?”

  “Yes sir. It will progress up to a point and then will stop and become permanent and will not change beyond that. With overwhelming head injuries sufficient to produce prolonged coma it may be progressive.”

  “All right now, what effect would such an injury have upon the behavior or the way a person behaves or acts?”

  “I base what I am about to say on a study of previous cases with problems of this sort and usually those with this problem to a more severe degree. A person with cerebral atrophy, this is a mild atrophy in this case, but a person with real cerebral atrophy tends to have episodes of, let’s say, intermittent explosive behavior, unpredictable usually. This may be precipitated or accentuated by alcohol intake and in effect it is usually a bizarre behavior.”

  “And could the repeated intake of alcohol continue the process of atrophy or wasting away?”

  “A very heavy intake of alcohol for a prolonged period would cause atrophy itself without head injury, so it becomes a bit more difficult to say specifically, since we have two known agents under discussion that can produce atrophy.”

  But when Marshall Schulman took the doctor on cross examination it was evident that the prosecutor had done his homework.

  “As a matter of fact,” said Schulman, “there are probably individuals in high prominent positions with atrophy of the brain
, are there not?”

  “Yes there are,” said the doctor. “I know of a congressman, but I won’t give his name.”

  “Okay, what about General Eisenhower as a result of a stroke?”

  “This would be unavoidable on the basis that I know of no other stroke that hasn’t had atrophy, so I must assume the President had.”

  “And you studied the results of those electroencephalogram tests, did you not?”

  “Yes sir, I did.”

  “And did they show normal?”

  “Yes sir, they did.”

  Then Schulman related a “hypothetical” statement of murder which included the Little Lindbergh statement and posed a question to refute the explosive behavior theory.

  “Well, the things in the hypothetical question,” said the doctor, “which would seem incomparable with the explosive behavior concept, would be the space of time involved for one thing.”

  “Let me put it this way, Doctor. The space of time involved at the time of the taking of the officers to the time of the shooting was approximately two hours. What would you now say?”

  “Well as I previously testified, if explosive behavior was to occur, usually it’s going to occur right away in my experience.”

  “You have indicated that alcohol may affect Mr. Powell’s condition, is that right?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “On the other hand it may not, isn’t that also right?”

  “That’s true.”

  “And if I related to you for the purpose of this question that just prior to this trial an EEG occurred, sleep induced, an alcohol induced EEG … you are familiar with both those tests?”