Silent Witness

by Michael Norman

  I began by reviewing the SIB’s intelligence file on the Reformed Church of the Divine Christ. Intelligence information, sketchy as it was, had determined that the church was established sometime in late 2002 after Bradshaw and several members of his family had been evicted from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) compound on the Arizona-Utah border.

  Scuttlebutt was that the church intended to purchase land in the desert red rock country of southern Utah large enough to support a growing band of polygamist church members, and remain independent from other Mormon fundamentalist groups. That plan, of course, required money, and the brethren seemed to have little compunction about stealing and robbing to get it.

  In the beginning, burglary and theft seemed to be their crimes of choice. There was a long string of unsolved property crimes committed against FLDS property all along the Utah-Arizona border. More recently, Bradshaw and his followers escalated their lawbreaking behavior to include armed robberies.

  Since his arrest and return to the Utah State Prison, Walter had received no fewer than two visits from detectives from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police and the Denver Police Department. In both instances, he was questioned about unsolved armored car robberies occurring in Vegas and Denver where the perps followed the same MO as the Salt Lake City heist. So far, no charges had been filed in either case because of insufficient evidence.

  As far I could tell, the church’s core membership consisted of patriarch Walter, his two sons, Albert and Joseph, their wives and children, a nephew of Walter, and two cousins. The nephew had been killed in the armored car robbery. The cousins, Randy and Robert Allred, both had extensive criminal records. Like Walter, Randy Allred was a parole violator wanted by authorities in Arizona.

  The Allred brothers and both of Walter’s sons were wanted for murder and aggravated robbery in the armored car mess. And it certainly wasn’t a big stretch to believe that the gang might be involved in Ginsberg’s murder as well as the disappearance of the other witness, Robin Joiner.

  I spent the better part of the next hour listening to my tape recorded interview with Walter Bradshaw hoping that I missed some small but important detail or subtlety in our conversation. When I reached the part where Bradshaw talked about Ginsberg and Joiner, something he said stopped me cold. I rewound the tape and played it again, and then once more. Maybe I’d found something. It was a small thing and it would take some digging.

  Eventually sheer exhaustion overtook my ability to listen or think. I spent the next two hours dozing on an old leather couch in the corner of my office until the first rays of sunshine touched the wood blinds and woke me.

  Chapter Nine

  I found my way into the kitchen intent on fixing a pot of coffee, then banana waffles for Sara and me. Raisin Bran with berries or a banana was Aunt June’s daily fare, and, unless we were all going out for breakfast, she seldom varied it.

  I decided not to say anything to Sara about the child custody issue until I had more information. That meant finding an attorney to represent us in Atlanta, no small feat in itself, and talking to my ex, Nicole. At the moment, I was angry at Nicole and wasn’t sure whether I could have a civil conversation with her. I guess I felt that she should have given me a heads-up about what she planned to do. But maybe she had, and I’d just missed the signals.

  Anger aside, I had to admit that Nicole was only doing what she believed was in Sara’s best interest. Yet I couldn’t reconcile how Nicole had arrived at the conclusion that moving Sara across the country, away from all her friends and everything familiar to her, was preferable to a stable home with a full-time dad and the loving presence of Aunt June. It just didn’t make sense. Unless Nicole planned to hire a live-in nanny, Sara would have to be shuffled to the home of her grandparents every time Nicole flew. And because of her seniority with the airline and her desire to visit far off places, Nicole frequently traveled abroad.

  After breakfast and a quick review of the words on her spelling test scheduled for later in the day, I dropped Sara at school and headed to my office at the state prison.

  ***

  I made it into the office before Terry Burnham arrived. I had devised a get-even scheme for the assortment of auto air fresheners Burnham had planted in my office prior to Ginsberg’s autopsy. He was late, and this gave me the perfect opportunity to implement my plan.

  I grabbed the master key that would unlock his desk and a bottle of glue. At the risk of ending up charged with the destruction of state property, I resisted the temptation to use Super Glue and stuck to the ordinary kind. With the deft touch of Van Gogh, who was only slightly crazier than I am, I slapped a coat of the stuff along the lip of the middle drawer of Burnham’s desk. I did the same to each of his side drawers.

  Patti, my secretary, and Marcy Everest, one of my investigators, hardly glanced in my direction as they hovered over the office coffee maker like a pair of addicts waiting in line at the local crack house. Finally, Marcy looked over and said, “What the hell kind of mischief are you up to now?”

  I smiled. “Wait and see.”

  When I finished, I relocked his desk and hustled back to my office to await his arrival and the show that would surely follow.

  A few minutes later, Burnham rolled in looking haggard and thoroughly hung over. He avoided eye contact with everyone and barely grumbled a hello at Marcy who had spoken to him. Keys in hand, he plopped down at his desk, and unlocked it. He gave the middle drawer a tug—nothing happened. He pulled again, still nothing.

  In a half whisper, he muttered, “What the fuck?” Then he gave the drawer a major pull and still nothing happened. The laughter around him started with a soft chuckle and quickly built to a crescendo.

  “Okay, I get it. Who fucked with my desk?”

  At that moment, I walked past him on my way out of the office to attend a nine o’clock budget meeting. When I got next to him, I whispered, “Pay-back’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

  As I closed the office door, the last thing I heard him mutter was, “You dirty dog.”

  ***

  When I returned from my management meeting, I called Patti in. “I’ve got a little research job for you. It could be a wild goose chase, but I want you to go back several months and pull every newspaper article about the armored car robbery and murder that appeared in the Deseret News, the Salt Lake Tribune, and even the City Weekly. Then I want you to contact the local TV stations and find out if they did on-camera interviews with any of the witnesses.”

  “Mind telling me what this is about?”

  “Something Walter Bradshaw said during my interview with him. It’s probably nothing but when I told him about Ginsberg’s murder, he said that he was pleased that it wasn’t that beautiful, young woman.”

  “So what?”

  “How would Bradshaw have known that she was beautiful and young?”

  Patti paused. “Maybe he saw her picture in the newspaper.”

  “Bingo. Or maybe she was interviewed by one of the TV stations and he saw that from his jail cell. That’s what I want you to find out.”

  “I’ll get right on it.”

  There were two voice messages on my office phone. The first was from Kate and the other was from Captain Jerry Branch. The call from Branch probably had something to do with Walter Bradshaw having received visitors after my interview with him. Maybe now we’d find out whether Walter was conducting gang business from the confines of his house at the state prison.

  I called Branch first. “Hi, Jerry, what’s up?”

  “Walter’s wife, Janine, came to see him yesterday afternoon at two-thirty. You weren’t out of the unit for more than ten minutes, and he was on the phone with her.”

  “Anything interesting come up in their conversation?”

  “Not really. Just run-of-the-mill bullshit stuff about family, future plans, and which bodily orifices of hers he intends to violate once he gets out. He didn’t say anything about
the current case or the murder of Ginsberg, and nothing was spoken in code.”

  Knowing that their phone calls were often monitored, gang leaders sometimes spoke on prison phones using code as a way of issuing orders to subordinates on the outside. Prison intelligence units like the SIB invariably had someone skilled at breaking those codes. Discussion in code was a sure sign of criminal gang activity in the community. The conversations usually related to drug trafficking or hits on rival gang members. There was nothing in the Reformed Church file to indicate that the Bradshaw family had ever used code when conversing on prison phones.

  Branch continued. “Bradshaw asked Janine to call his lawyer—a guy named Gordon Dixon. His office called this morning and said he’d be here between nine and nine-thirty—no sign of him yet, though. Want me to listen in?”

  I glanced at my watch. It was nearly nine-thirty. “Naw, I don’t want to put you in a bad spot, Jerry. I’m afraid that’s a privileged conversation between lawyer and client. I’ll come right over and take care of it myself.” He snorted a laugh and hung up.

  I’m not normally prone to violating the rules in order to further an investigation, but on occasion, I’ve been known to bend a rule to the breaking point. Normally, eavesdropping on a privileged conversation in prison between a lawyer and an inmate client was definitely a no-no unless reasonable grounds existed to believe that something illegal was going on. In this instance, it was a hell of a stretch, and I knew it.

  If Bradshaw was directing church activities from inside the prison, and those activities were criminal in nature, as I suspected, he had to be communicating with someone on the outside. He could only be doing that through letters, phone calls, or during non-contact visits. Besides his attorney, Bradshaw’s only visitors were members of his immediate family. Surveillance carried out by prison staff hadn’t turned up anything suspicious regarding family members. If the illegal communication wasn’t occurring through family contact then the only person left was his lawyer, Gordon Dixon. And by law, Dixon’s access had been completely unmonitored—at least until now.

  I was cloistered in a closet-like office in the prison’s administration building wearing a head-set and listening to a lot of line static. I was surrounded by telephone company equipment and sophisticated hi-tech gadgetry designed to eavesdrop on telephone calls and monitor conversations between inmates and their visitors.

  When Dixon and Bradshaw picked up their respective phones, the static gave way to absolute clarity. The first thing one of them said in a barely audible whisper was, “Not here.” They exchanged greetings and made small talk until Dixon turned the conversation to a strategy discussion for the preliminary hearing scheduled for later in the day.

  After Dixon left Uintah 1, I caught up with Jerry Branch in his office. Branch had observed the visit through one-way glass and saw something that confirmed my suspicions. As the two men stared at each other through the glass partition and reached for the phones, Dixon made a sweeping motion with his left hand, brushing his index finger across his lips in a gesture meant to say, keep quiet. That must have occurred just before I heard somebody whisper, “not here.”

  The entire conversation took less than fifteen minutes, and yet I’d learned something important. There was something Dixon didn’t want to discuss with Walter Bradshaw over the prison phones, but what was it?

  Chapter Ten

  The other message had been from Kate. She wanted me to meet her at the home of Arnold Ginsberg for what would be a follow-up interview with the victim’s live-in partner, Rodney Plow. She didn’t come right out and say it, but I think she wanted me along to provide my impressions of the bereaved partner. Clearly, something about Plow’s demeanor during his first interview had made Kate uncomfortable.

  Ginsberg lived in an older, but exclusive neighborhood, high on Salt Lake City’s east bench off Wasatch Boulevard, between Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons. The directions Kate had provided carried me up the side of the mountain along roads that snaked back-and-forth like switch-back trails. Eventually, I topped out on Ridge View Drive and realized that I could climb no higher. Ginsberg’s home had been carved out of the side of the mountain. It was located on the eastside of Ridge View and commanded striking views of the entire Salt Lake valley and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west.

  Kate was parked in front of the house when I arrived. According to Kate, Plow had been so emotionally distraught upon learning of Ginsberg’s death that she hadn’t been able to conduct a particularly thorough interview. She hoped to finish the interview today. From the street, we walked up a steep, narrow asphalt driveway that lead to a triple car garage. Looking back, I said, “Gorgeous views up here, but how would you like to try to get down that driveway in a blizzard?”

  “It looks a bit intimidating. If you didn’t have a four-wheel drive vehicle, you’d be screwed.”

  “You might be screwed even with four-wheel drive. If you slid down the driveway and couldn’t get control when you hit the street, you might end up in the living room of that house across the street.”

  Rodney Plow wasn’t what I expected. He was tall, tanned, slim, and looked twenty years younger than Ginsberg. He walked us through the foyer into the living room where we were introduced to a friend, a guy named Chad Emery, who seemed to be there for moral support. Rodney and Emery sat across from us on a sun flower print couch huddled together holding hands. Each had a partially consumed cup of java sitting on the glass coffee table. A box of tissues sat on the seat cushion next to Plow.

  After condolences, Kate began. “Mr. Plow, when we spoke yesterday, I didn’t have the opportunity to ask you whether Arnold ever gave you any indication that he might be having problems or be in conflict with someone? Could anyone in your social circle or among his business associates have been threatening him?”

  He pondered the question for a moment before answering. “Nothing comes to mind. Arnie never had an enemy in the world. Everybody who knew him loved him. That certainly included our friends as well as his business clients. You probably don’t know this but many of Arnie’s business clients were also our friends.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “Well, several of Arnie’s corporate clients are travel agencies. If you know anything about the travel industry, you know that many people who own and work in the travel business come from the gay community. I’ll bet Arnie prepared most of the individual tax returns for gay travel agents in Salt Lake City.”

  “Interesting,” said Kate. “And aren’t you a travel agent? Is that how the two of you met?”

  He gave Kate a big toothy grin. “Yes and yes. I was employed at Rocky Mountain Travel, and Arnie handled their corporate taxes. Like a lot of other travel agents, I started having him prepare my individual tax returns, and well, one thing led to another, and pretty soon we were an item.”

  “And how long ago was that?” replied Kate, returning the big friendly smile.

  Tears welled in the corners of his eyes. He reached for a tissue. “I was just thinking about that this morning. It was exactly three years ago this month,” he said, choking back a sob.

  Kate gave him a moment to compose himself and then continued. “I know this is difficult for you, Mr. Plow, but just a few more questions and we’ll be finished. Back to my previous question, you aren’t aware of anyone who might have been a threat to Mr. Ginsberg?”

  For the moment, he seemed to have regained control of his emotions. “The one thing Arnie worried about was having to be a witness against that awful man, you know, the guy who robbed and killed those people outside the Target store.”

  “And you know this because……”

  Plow interrupted before Kate could finish the question. “He told me so, several times in fact.”

  “Told you what?”

  “That he was afraid of having to testify in court against that man, Bradshaw, I think his name is. He said this Bradshaw was a member of a violent group of Mormon fundamentalist
s who probably hated gays. And I don’t think it was much comfort to Arnie that Bradshaw was in jail.”

  “And why was that?”

  “Because the police never caught the rest of them,” said Plow, a touch of anger and accusation in his voice.

  “Then you believe Mr. Ginsberg was killed by members of Bradshaw’s gang?”

  Plow hesitated. “Well, of course, I don’t know who killed him for sure, but yeah, the church freaks would seem like a pretty good bet, don’t you think?”

  Kate nodded.

  “How would you describe your relationship with the victim?”

  More tears. Out came another tissue. “It was extremely close and loving. We were committed to each other for life.”

  “Did you ever have fights?”

  “Almost never. Oh, we’d have the occasional quarrel, but it never amounted to much.”

  “One last question,” said Kate, “and please don’t be offended. It’s a routine question that we have to ask in these kinds of cases. We need to know your whereabouts around the time of the murder?”

  Plow momentarily looked shocked but answered without hesitation. “We had planned a quiet dinner at home, just the two of us. He was supposed to be home at five. I stayed around the house that morning but left a little after noon.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “First, I went to the Cottonwood Athletic Club where I swam and tanned. My tanning appointment was at one so I would have left there at around one-thirty. After that I dropped by the Wild Oats Market on Ft. Union Boulevard for a few groceries, and then I stopped at the Market Street Grill in Cottonwood where I bought the fresh halibut we were supposed to have for dinner.”

  “And what time did you arrive home?”

  “Three-thirty, maybe three-forty-five.”

  “Did you remain at home for the remainder of the day?”