by D. W. Buffa
“You were the lead investigator in the case involving the murder of Judge Calvin Jeffries?”
“I was one of them,” Stewart explained.
She pivoted a quarter turn. Facing the jury, she asked, “And was an arrest made in that case?”
“Yes, there was. Jacob Whittaker was charged with the murder of Judge Jeffries.”
“And would you please tell the jury,” she said as she plucked lint from her sleeve and brushed it away, “did the person you arrested confess to the crime?”
There was no response from the witness. Loescher glanced up.
“Detective?”
“He made a confession. That’s true.”
It was not as emphatic, nor as immediate, as she would have liked, but when he finally gave it, the answer was clear enough.
One more question and there would be no more room for doubt, and that slight hesitation in his voice would be all but forgotten, a momentary lapse of memory, the sort of thing that happens to witnesses all the time.
She settled her eyes on the jury, a confident smile on her lips.
“And tell us, Detective Stewart, what did the confessed killer of Calvin Jeffries do after he confessed?”
“That evening he was found dead in his cell.”
The smile froze on her face. Her eyes flared as she turned on him. “You mean he committed suicide, don’t you?”
“That was the official finding, that’s correct,” Stewart replied without expression.
She looked at him, trying to figure out why he did not answer her questions the way he was supposed to, instead of insisting on all these unnecessary distinctions. He was a police officer, not a lawyer, and while he was not supposed to lie, neither was he supposed to make the truth more difficult to grasp.
“Just to sum up, then. There was an arrest, there was a confession, and the man who confessed, it was officially decided, then took his own life. One last question, Detective Stewart. After the arrest, after the confession, after the suicide, what happened to the investigation? Did it continue, or was it closed?”
“It was closed,” he replied.
Loescher looked at the jury. “The killer was caught, and the killer confessed, and the case was closed.” She sat down, and then, as if she had just remembered, glanced up at the bench. “No further questions, your honor.”
I stood up so fast I had to catch the chair from falling over.
“We’ve met before, haven’t we, Detective Stewart?” I asked, laughing at myself as I stumbled free of the chair.
He did not hesitate. “Yes, we have.”
Loescher’s head came up, and she looked at him and then at me.
“You’ve been a witness for the prosecution in several trials in which I’ve been the attorney for the defense, isn’t that correct?” I asked as I straightened the chair and moved away from the table.
“Yes, that’s correct,” he said.
Loescher looked back at the legal pad on which she had begun to scribble a note to herself.
“Jacob Whittaker—the man who was arrested, the man who confessed, the man found dead in his cell—how did you know where to find him?”
“An anonymous phone call.”
“And where did this anonymous caller say the killer could be found?”
“Under the bridge.”
“That’s the Morrison Street Bridge, correct?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And that’s where he was found—under the Morrison Street Bridge—living as one of the homeless?”
“Yes.”
“How do you imagine the caller—this anonymous caller—knew who the killer was and where he could be found?”
Stewart shook his head. “I don’t really know.”
“Did Whittaker have any idea who the informant might have been?”
With an audible sigh, Loescher stood up. “Your honor, I fail to see the relevance of any of this.”
Judge Bingham looked at me, waiting.
“I’m trying to establish a pattern, your honor. In both cases an anonymous caller informed the police where they could find the al-leged killer, and both times it was in the same place. I’m trying to find out who could have had this information about both murders.”
Loescher stretched out her hands. “It’s simply a coincidence. The detective has already established by his testimony that the killer of Calvin Jeffries could not possibly have had anything to do with the murder of Quincy Griswald.” She darted a glance at the jury. “Being dead and all.”
“You’ll address yourself to the court,” Bingham snapped. “Now, Mr. Antonelli,” he went on in his usual tone, “are you about finished with this line of inquiry?”
“Almost, your honor.” I turned back to the witness. “Did Whittaker know anything about the informant?”
Stewart tilted his head, pursed his lips, and shut his eyes into long thin slits. “I don’t know if he did or not. But if he did, he didn’t tell us.”
“When he was arrested and brought in, you assumed he was one of the homeless, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Tell me, Detective Stewart, did you discover before or after you closed the investigation into the murder of Calvin Jeffries that the man who confessed to his killing was a mental patient at the state hospital?”
The courtroom erupted, and for the first time in the trial Bingham had to use his gavel to quiet the crowd. The public had never been told that Jeffries’s killer had been an escaped mental patient.
From the look on Loescher’s face, she had not been told either.
“Whittaker was arrested, confessed, and died, all in the same day,”
Stewart explained when the courtroom became quiet. “We did not know who he was, or what he was, until his fingerprints came back a few days later.”
I went after him as if we were old adversaries instead of recent friends.
“You were in the room when he confessed and you didn’t notice anything strange about him? He struck you as a completely normal, a completely sane individual?”
Even if I had been acting in anger, it would have had no effect: Stewart was unflappable. “There were things about him that didn’t seem normal.”
“Such as?”
“The way he kept repeating the same phrase over and over again when I asked him why he did it. He kept saying, ‘I really can’t say.’
At first I thought he meant he didn’t know, that he couldn’t explain why he had done it. Then, gradually, I began to believe that he knew, but that for some reason he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, talk about it.”
I stood completely still. “That he wasn’t allowed to talk about it?”
Stewart was not going to be led into saying something he did not believe. “That he knew why he had done it, but that he wasn’t going to tell us. Why he wouldn’t tell us is a question I can’t answer. I just don’t know.”
“But it struck you as odd that someone would confess to a murder—tell you he’d done it—but refuse to tell you why?”
“Yes, it struck me as odd,” he agreed.
That was all I would need: the admission by the state’s own witness—the lead investigator in the murder of Calvin Jeffries—that there was something odd, something not quite right about the confession of the killer. It gave me the opening to argue that there was a reason to doubt that the person responsible for Jeffries’s death had ever been found, and that there was a reason to believe that the two murders were connected. Loescher, too smart not to see it too, closed it with a few well-phrased questions on redirect.
“You just testified that Jacob Whittaker confessed to killing Calvin Jeffries, but would not tell you why he did it,” she asked as she rose from her chair.
Stewart nodded. “Yes.”
She stood at the table, resting the fingertips of her left hand on top of it. “Mr. Antonelli asked you if you agreed that this was—I believe the word he used was ‘odd’—correct?”
“Yes.”
She indulged herself in one of those smug little smiles that the smartest girl in class used to have when she knew the answer and, worse yet, knew you did not. “But Mr. Antonelli also asked you if you knew that Jacob Whittaker was a mental patient. In your experience, Detective Stewart, would it be unusual for a mental patient to do things or say things that the rest of us would consider odd?”
“No,” he agreed.
She raised her chin, the smile replaced by a look of earnest conviction. “You were the lead investigator in that case. Just tell us: Do you have any doubt—any doubt whatsoever—that Jacob Whittaker is the person who murdered Judge Jeffries?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Stewart replied, “No, no doubt at all.”
Turning toward the jury Loescher repeated the question for effect. “No doubt at all?”
Bingham, sitting sideways to the bench, looked up from something he was reading in his lap. “Recross?”
“Detective Stewart,” I said as I got to my feet, “why are you so certain that Jacob Whittaker killed Judge Jeffries? People have been known to confess to things they didn’t do, haven’t they?”
“Yes, but in this case Whittaker knew things about the murder—
details—that weren’t released to the public.”
“What details, Detective Stewart?”
“Judge Jeffries was not just stabbed to death: The killer disemboweled him.”
“Gutted him?”
“Yes.”
“And when Whittaker told you this, his account was both clear and convincing?”
“Yes.”
“He wasn’t ranting, or raving, or doing any of those other ‘odd’
things we tend to associate with lunatics?”
“No, he wasn’t doing any of that.”
“You discovered that Whittaker was a mental patient. Why was he a mental patient? Was he there because of a civil commitment or a criminal commitment?”
“Whittaker had been found incompetent to stand trial for a crime he committed.”
I walked toward the jury box. “And what crime was that, Detective Stewart?” I asked, my head bent down, my hands locked behind my back.
“Murder.”
I could feel it, the inaudible gasp, the tension that gripped the room at the knowledge that the killer of Calvin Jeffries had killed before. I did not look up.
“And who did he murder, Detective Stewart?”
“His father.”
I slowly raised my head. “His father? With a knife?”
“No, he beat him to death with his bare hands.”
“Why did he do it?”
Stewart was leaning forward, his elbows braced on the arms of the witness chair. His head moved from side to side. “There was a long history of abuse. His father was a drunk, and he made a habit of beating up his wife—Whittaker’s mother. Finally, something snapped, I guess, and he literally went out of his mind.”
“So he had a motive?”
“Yes.”
“What motive did he have to kill Jeffries?”
Stewart shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Well, did he know Jeffries?”
“No.”
“Was Jeffries the judge who sent him to the state hospital?”
“No.”
“It’s true, isn’t it, Detective Stewart, that you weren’t able to find any connection at all between Whittaker and the man he killed?”
“No, we didn’t.”
“And there was no other obvious motive either, was there?”
“No.”
He looked at me, a quizzical expression on his face.
“It wasn’t a robbery, was it?”
“No.”
“Nothing was taken from Judge Jeffries, was there?”
“No.”
“So it wasn’t a robbery, it wasn’t revenge; he did not even know him and without any motive just decides to lie in wait for him and kill him in a particularly gruesome manner. But, of course, he was a mental patient—insane—and that explains everything, doesn’t it?” I asked rhetorically, glaring across at Cassandra Loescher.
“Where was he a mental patient, Detective Stewart?”
He seemed surprised by the question. “The Oregon State Hospital.”
“He had been there more than ten years, hadn’t he?”
“I believe so.”
“In the forensic ward of the state hospital, where the criminally insane are kept, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that the same place where Elliott Winston has been kept for the last twelve years?”
“Objection!” Loescher protested before he could answer. “There’s been no foundation established to demonstrate that the witness would have direct knowledge of this.”
“Withdraw the question, your honor.” I stood at the end of the jury box, my arms folded across my chest. “Now, Detective Stewart, you’ve testified that you have no doubt at all that Jacob Whittaker was the person who murdered Judge Jeffries, but you also testified that you thought there was something odd about his confession. I don’t need to remind you that you’re under oath, Detective Stewart, but I want you to think carefully about your answer to this question. When he was telling you—repeating it over and over again—that he couldn’t say when you asked him why he had done it, did you believe then that there was something else going on, that there was in fact a reason why he had killed this man he did not know and had never met?”
“Yes, I thought that was a possibility.”
“And when Quincy Griswald was killed, did you think there might be some connection—some possible connection—between the two murders, even though the second one could not have been committed by the man who committed the first?”
“The two murders were almost identical.”
“Almost?”
“Yes. Both victims were stabbed, but only the first one was disemboweled.”
“But with that exception, they were identical?”
“Yes, but that exception seemed at first to argue against any connection. It was the one important detail that had never been released to the public. Because of that, I assumed the second was some kind of copycat killing.”
“At first?”
“Yes. I began to wonder more about it when I learned of the way the arrest was made and where it was made: the anonymous phone call, the homeless man living under the same bridge. It was hard to believe there wasn’t some connection.”
“Did you do anything to pursue this suspicion?”
“When they brought in the suspect …” He paused and nodded toward the counsel table. Danny was sitting with his head sunk down on his chest, half asleep. “I sat in on the interview.”
“You weren’t part of the investigation?”
“No.”
I glanced over at Danny and then looked back at Stewart. “Did he confess?”
“No. We didn’t talk to him very long. He was filthy and he had to be cleaned up. But, no, he didn’t confess.”
I made my way from the jury box to the chair where Danny was just starting to pay attention and stood behind him, my hands on his shoulders.
“Ms. Loescher asked if you had any doubt whether Jacob Whittaker killed Calvin Jeffries. You sat in on the police interview of the defendant. Do you have any doubt about his guilt?”
Stewart had been around for years. He knew there was something wrong with the question. More by instinct than design, he gave the prosecution time to object.
He did not have to wait long. Loescher’s arm shot into the air with such force it seemed to pull the rest of her along with it.
“Your honor!” she shouted, banging her hand down on the table.
“This goes beyond anything—!”
Bingham seemed almost amused by her outburst. “You wish to make an objection, Ms. Loescher?”
She looked at him, her mouth hanging open, and blinked. “Yes, your honor,” she said, quite calm. “The question calls for speculation.�
�
“The prosecution asked this witness his opinion of the guilt of the person charged with the murder of Judge Jeffries,” I responded.
“That opened the door to an inquiry of this same witness about his opinion of the guilt or innocence of the defendant in this case.”
Bingham politely disagreed. “I’m afraid I don’t see it quite that way, Mr. Antonelli. The witness was the lead investigator in the first case. He was asked his opinion based on that investigation.
And no objection was made to that question,” he added, letting me know that he would not, given a proper objection, have allowed that one either. “You’re asking him to give an opinion on a case in which he was not involved. For that reason the objection must be sustained.”
“I’ll rephrase the question, your honor,” I said as I started to turn back to Stewart.
“It doesn’t matter how he phrases it, your honor. The question can’t be asked.”
“She’s right, Mr. Antonelli.”
“I’ll limit myself to what Detective Stewart observed.”
“Just so you don’t elicit any opinion regarding the ultimate issue,”
Bingham insisted.
“Yes, your honor. I promise I won’t ask the witness what he really thinks.”
“Your honor!” Loescher cried.
Bingham held up his hand, then leaned back in his chair and began to tap his fingers together, a stern expression clouding his brow. Presently, he sat forward and the seldom disturbed civil smile returned to his clean, straight mouth.
“I really never expected that sort of thing from you.”
I could have ignored and almost enjoyed the angry shouting of one of the many intemperate, self-important judges who take pleasure in the pain they can inflict on the lawyers who practice in front of them. This hurt, all the more because he was right. It was a cheap trick that never worked.
“I apologize, your honor. That was inexcusable.”
He kept his gaze on me a moment longer, then looked at the jury.
“Sometimes, in the course of a trial, things are said that shouldn’t be said and that the person who says them immediately regrets. This is particularly true in a case like this one where something very serious is at issue. Mr. Antonelli said something which I’m going to ask you to ignore and which I know he wishes he had not said. I want you to understand this very clearly. Detective Stewart was asked if he had an opinion about the guilt or innocence of the defendant. I don’t know if he does or not; I do know that it doesn’t matter if he does. Opinions don’t count: Facts, and only facts, count.
