Amy Hastings testified that Kaithlin knew R. J. was unfaithful and feared he was responsible for the missing money. But he had been the only man in her life since she was sixteen. When he refused marriage counseling, Kaithlin went alone. As he became more abusive, she had turned to the courts, even appealed to her in-laws—but the mentor who helped others found none for herself.
R. J.’s own mistress testified against him. Dallas Suarez strutted to the stand wearing a tight white blouse and a black skirt, a bombshell witness for the prosecution. Now contrite, she provided motive. She was the flight instructor who had trained R. J. on the Beechcraft. Their passionate affair began in the cockpit. They scuba-dived, went flying, and air-boated in the Everglades while Kaithlin worked. R. J. bought Suarez a Jaguar convertible and made the payments on her condo apartment.
The high point of her testimony came when she flashed a soulful look at the stony-faced defendant and burst into tears, blurting, “I never thought he’d kill her.” R. J., she said, had vowed to dump his wife for her but never said it would be out of a plane.
Prosecutors theorized that R. J. embezzled the money to finance his womanizing lifestyle, then murdered Kaithlin to prevent her from exposing him to the police—or his parents. It was during the testimony of Dallas Suarez, Janowitz noted, that several of the female jurors began to glare unrelentingly at the defendant.
They continued to do so as Miami police officers testified about domestic battery calls to the big home R. J. and Kaithlin shared on Old Cutler Road. Other investigators testified that the embezzlement suspects had been narrowed down to three employees, Kaithlin, R. J., and Walt Peterson, the store’s financial officer, an old college fraternity brother hired by R. J. himself.
Peterson took the Fifth, declining to testify about financial matters on grounds that he might incriminate himself.
The cash confiscated from R. J. at his arrest could not be traced to any legitimate source. The prosecution contended that it was part of the money he and Peterson conspired to steal.
An employee at the Silver Shore Motel in Daytona testified that he heard a man’s voice, loud and angry, in the couple’s room.
The bloodstains in that room, on the plane, and on the clothes in the shattered overnight case were all the same type—Kaithlin’s. Her mother had given a blood sample for DNA testing, and results confirmed that chances were astronomical that the blood could have come from anyone other than her child.
The defense was in trouble. R. J. was all they had. Still cocky, he took the stand. Sure, he had lied at first. Who wouldn’t? he asked. The police were clearly out to get him. The weekend had been stormy, he belatedly admitted. They had quarreled. He did slap her. But that was all, only a slap. She had scratched him, he conceded, but R. J. swore he never hurt Kaithlin. He loved her. Dallas Suarez, he said, was a mere diversion because his wife was busy working and he was bored. His interfering mother-in-law, he stated bitterly, was the cause of their problems. The cash he had when arrested, he swore, came from his own private funds, gambling winnings kept on hand for emergencies. He had intended to use the money to launch his own investigation to prove his innocence, he said. The prosecutor caustically pointed out that R. J. must have planned to do so from a distance, since he’d been carrying his passport as well.
He last saw his wife, R. J. insisted again and again under cross-examination, as she walked off across the Daytona Airport tarmac to fetch Cokes from a vending machine.
The defense used the usual blame-the-victim tactics, hammering on the theory that Kaithlin was alive, in hiding, to exact revenge on a cheating husband. If she was dead, they said, it was at her own hand, despondent over her marital woes.
The prosecutor scoffed. Did she commit suicide and hide her own body? He introduced Kaithlin’s engagement calendar, crammed full of appointments and notes on future plans. If she was alive, why had none of her cash, checks, or credit cards been used? Nothing was missing from the Key Biscayne apartment she had occupied since their separation. Bank accounts, valuables, her driver’s license and passport—all left behind. Her car, coated with dust, was still parked in her reserved space.
It was all proof she was dead, they said, and that R. J. had killed her.
Despite creativity and fancy footwork from a battery of high-priced defense attorneys, the jury returned a verdict in less than forty-five minutes: guilty of murder in the first degree. They took even less time to recommend death in a subsequent penalty phase. The judge agreed. R. J. stood sullen at sentencing and continued to proclaim his innocence.
Lead defense attorney Fuller G. Stockton later confided to reporters that the most he had hoped for was to save his client’s life. The charge never should have been first degree, a death-penalty case, he said. It should have been second degree, unpremeditated and committed in the heat of passion.
Appellate courts upheld death, citing R. J.’s history of domestic violence, his prior run-ins with the law, the victim’s restraining order, and his complete lack of remorse. On appeal, the state supreme court ruled that, though circumstantial, the evidence established both premeditation and corpus delicti and called the sentence consistent with other cases that warranted execution.
Another aggravating factor, Janowitz concluded in his final story on the case, was that R. J. was tried in upstate Volusia County, actually the deep South, a place where rich arrogant Miamians with slick big-city lawyers were unpopular, if not downright despised.
Questions flooded my mind. Was R. J.’s conviction a conspiracy of women? Did Kaithlin’s mother know all along that her daughter was alive? I ran Reva Warren through the News library. Her name had appeared only once after the trial: May 11, 1996, dead at seventy. No story, only a brief agate obit.
Amy Hastings’s name had not appeared in print at all since the trial. Had she left town, I wondered, or changed her name through marriage?
I punched more names into the search mode. Another casualty surfaced: Conrad B. Jordan, R. J.’s father, dead of complications after heart surgery in 1994 at age seventy-three. The 110-year family dynasty ended, the chain was sold to a Canadian conglomerate. The saga read like a Greek tragedy.
R. J.’s widowed mother, Eunice, still lived in Miami. Society columns noted her frequent attendance at charitable functions and benefit luncheons. Her most recent photo, at an Adopt-A-Pet fund-raiser, had appeared in the newspaper only a month ago. Still elegant, she still wore black. How would she react to the extraordinary news of her son’s return from the valley of the shadow?
3
A figure loomed, silhouetted in the doorway, as I swallowed the last cold and bitter dregs of my coffee.
“How’s it going?” Rooney asked.
“Great,” I said. “Greed, sex, violence—the story’s got it all.”
“Didn’t think you’d be here at this hour if it didn’t.” He sat in a chair across the desk from me and smiled. His uniform was crisply starched, and he smelled optimistically of shaving lotion.
“Brought you something.” He placed a cellophane-wrapped packet of peanut butter and cheese crackers before me like an offering. “Thought you might be hungry. It was all that was left in the machine,” he said shyly.
“My favorite,” I said. “Thanks.”
“I never thanked you for all you did for Angel and the kids while I was at sea,” he said. “Times were tough. I coulda lost her.”
“Angel is pretty feisty,” I said. “She can take care of herself.”
“Well, I’m taking over that job now. I’ll be looking after her and the kids and they won’t be having any more problems.” He looked terribly young, his honest brown eyes solemn in the shadowy room’s half-light. Did he have any idea, I wondered, what he was getting into? He must have read my mind.
“Some of my friends say I’m crazy to marry a woman with children.”
“They’re probably concerned about you,” I said. “Step-parenting is no picnic.”
“But I’m looking forward to it,” he sa
id enthusiastically. “Taking care of kids, raising ’em right, is the most important thing in the world. Every child needs a daddy.”
“That’s true.” His sincerity touched me. “I never knew mine,” I said. “He was killed in Cuba, by a Castro firing squad, when I was three. But I think I have some good memories, him lifting me up onto a pony, holding me up high to see the star on top of a Christmas tree. Maybe they’re real, maybe I imagined them, but I think of him always.”
“See how important dads are?” He rocked in anticipation, his face aglow. “I know it’ll be a madhouse, but I love kids. My daddy always said, ‘When you have a big family, you’re never alone, and you’re never bored.’”
“That’s right, you’re too busy.”
He grinned and stood up. “Need to get back out on my rounds, but I’ll keep an eye on you. Let me know if you need anything and give a holler when you leave so I can escort you to your car.”
His jaunty footsteps retreated down the hall as I gazed again at the wedding photo of the rich and beautiful Jordans who had it all. What chance did Angel and this goofy kid have, I wondered, beginning with nothing but children in a world where love is so often fatal?
I put together the background for the main story, then researched for a sidebar about other death penalty cases in which no corpse was ever found.
In the movies and on TV cop shows the rule is always: “No corpse, no crime, no case.” Not true. I found more than I expected, including the high-profile case of a politically connected Delaware lawyer who murdered his sweetheart, the governor’s secretary, and disposed of her body in the Atlantic. He’s probably the only rich white lawyer on death row in this country, though lots more surely belong there.
Another case, also in Daytona Beach, involved a teenage schoolgirl. Her name was Kathy. Her grandparents dropped her off at a convenience store, where she met two teenage girlfriends and a young man. Eventually Kathy left alone with him. She was never seen again.
Police questioned the young man. He said they had stopped at another store where he talked to two other girls while Kathy used a pay phone. Next time he glanced up, he said, she was gone. The officers saw scratches on his skin and a bruise on his side. Shaped like a footprint, the bruise was consistent with the shoes worn by the missing girl.
The suspect, who had a violent record, told acquaintances that a teenager had resisted sex with him, forcing him to slash her throat and hide her body. She was sixteen.
His lawyers, like R. J.’s, argued that there was no proof of a crime without a corpse. Appeals-court judges rejected the argument. Kathy had never run away. She had left her purse in her grandparents’ car, saying she’d only be gone a short time. Her small bank account and personal possessions remained intact and, as a new member of the high school dance team, she had eagerly anticipated the fall semester. The combined circumstances convinced the judges that she was dead—murdered.
Young girl gone, without even a grave for loved ones to visit. As I sat there alone, in the dead of night, her piquant face smiled up at me from her photo, a typically curious teenager, too young to realize that a moment’s bad judgment is often fatal.
So much sadness, so much evil loose in the world.
By 6 A.M., impatient for the sun and the rest of the city to rise, I called my mother.
“Britt, darling, is something wrong?”
I felt a moment’s guilt, but hell, I was wide awake, shouldn’t everybody else be?
“No, I’m working on a story.”
“You’re certainly off to an early start.” She sounded more hoarse than sleepy.
“Mom, you don’t sound like yourself. Are you coming down with something?”
“No, I’m fine. I just didn’t sleep well.”
“I didn’t sleep at all. Why didn’t you tell me the dead woman in that picture was Kaithlin Jordan?”
There was a long silence. “It did remind me a great deal of Kaithlin…”
Swell, I thought. She did recognize her.
“…but the poor thing, bless her heart, has been dead and gone for years now.” The words sounded oddly hollow.
“No. She was gone but not dead, at least not until now.”
No response, another silence.
“Britt, darling,” she finally said, voice wary, “what an outlandish thing to say. Are you sure you’re all right?”
I explained why I’d been up all night, told her what I had learned. “You could have said something, Mom. I mean, you knew them, didn’t you?”
“Of course,” she said softly. “I knew Kaithlin. Such a bright and quick-witted young woman, with the most wonderful laugh. I trained her; then, before I knew it, she was my boss. I didn’t mind. She worked so hard that no one could begrudge her anything. She was special.”
“What about R. J.?”
She gave a quick, impatient sigh of disapproval. “He was spoiled. Never really interested in the business, except to flirt and sweet-talk all the young sales associates, who, of course, loved the attention from the boss’s son. On good days, R. J. could charm the sharks out of the sea; on others he was perfectly dreadful. Always volatile and short-tempered when everything didn’t go his way. Once, while he was still in college, he and his dad had a fight, a brawl, right in the executive offices. No one who knew him ever doubted that he killed poor Kaithlin.
“It was so terribly sad.” Her voice dropped to a near whisper. “Conrad and Eunice wanted to build a dynasty, but Eunice miscarried twice, and a premature daughter died at birth. All they had was R. J. They were so grateful that he was healthy and beautiful….”
She paused and I could hear her light a cigarette. I thought she had quit.
“The Jordans never could say no to him, and he knew it.” She exhaled deeply. “With all that followed…maybe some people are just not meant to have children.”
“How did they get along with Kaithlin?”
“In their eyes, she came from the wrong side of the tracks. But once they saw R. J. was serious they were thrilled, at first. She was their great hope for the future of the bloodline—and the family business. I heard they promised to double R. J.’s inheritance if he and Kaithlin produced a male heir. I’m sure it was true.”
“What was the courtship like?”
“Well, that Cinderella story was a tad exaggerated. Made it sound like the glass slipper fit and he instantly dropped to one knee to propose. Actually, it was turbulent. R. J. wasn’t easy. They were on-again off-again for years before the ring and the fairy-tale wedding. She was so young, her mother was so upset, and he—well, he was just R. J. They ended it at one point. He saw other women. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. But apparently they simply couldn’t stay apart. Young as she was, nobody could hold a candle to Kaithlin. She had a certain…something.”
“So what happened? Why wasn’t it happily ever after?”
Silence. I heard her breathing; otherwise I would have thought the line was dead.
“I see from the clips,” I offered, “that she became manager.”
“That’s right,” she said quietly. “Kaithlin chose to work until they started a family. She was immensely talented. Her promotions and young ideas gave new style and energy to the Jordan image. Annual sales increased by more than thirty percent, she was so resourceful. R. J. was relieved that somebody—anybody—was taking care of the business, as long as it didn’t have to be him. But I think he resented it when she became so successful.”
“If she wanted to disappear,” I said impatiently, “where do you think she’d go? What would she do?”
“Britt, dear, I simply can’t imagine Kaithlin doing such an implausible thing. I can’t believe she’s been alive all these years. You’re sure?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
“How awful. How cruel.” Her voice faded, so distant that I strained to hear. “The stores never would have been sold…and Con would still be alive, I’m sure of it. He never got over seeing his son sentenced to death.”
Con? “You were friendly with Jordan senior?”
She hesitated. “I worked for him—with him—for many years.”
Slowly, as I grow older, I learn more about my mother, but the process is long, slow, and never easy. I decided this was not the time to try to draw her out.
“Did Kaithlin have affairs? Did she steal the money?”
“Of course not! R. J. was her first and only love, Jordan’s her first and only job. She had ethics. She was loyal.”
“Then who took the money?”
“What’s the point of all this now?” she asked irritably. “It was so long ago.”
“It matters, Mom. This is a major story.”
“The Jordans dropped the investigation into the missing money after the murder—or whatever it was,” she said reluctantly. “R. J. was in enough trouble. Everybody suspected him and Walt Peterson, that accountant he hired. They were long-time chums, involved in dubious escapades together ever since high school. Peterson was fired, of course. I think Con and Eunice covered for them both. They attributed the loss to poor accounting practices that had been corrected. Lucky for them it was a family-owned company.”
I closed my tired eyes for a moment. “How do you remember her?” I said. “What was she like?”
“I don’t like talking about this,” she said. “But there was something about her eyes, even when she smiled. The months before her mur—whatever, you know what I mean—her eyes looked darker, as if she saw things others didn’t. I remembered that later. She didn’t laugh as often. She looked almost haunted, or hunted…. Listen to me rambling on like this. I sound ridiculous. Have to go now, sweetheart, I have an early meeting.”
“But Mom—”
“Love you, dear.”
The line went dead.
Conversations with my mother often left me uneasy, not so much about what was said as what was left unspoken. Why did those words always seem to be the most important?
I met Rychek at the employees’ entrance at 6:45 A.M. Eager to stretch my legs, I trotted briskly down five flights from the newsroom. Despite my protests, Rooney trotted dutifully at my heels, hell-bent on protecting me whether I needed it or not.
You Only Die Twice Page 5
