Lethal Guardian

by M. William Phelps

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And what year was that?”

  Without missing a beat: “August 1992.”

  She said she was ultimately hired by Clein himself, then began talking about Kim and Rebecca, implying that Kim’s PKU disease “leads to mental retardation” if left untreated, as well as “sexual promiscuity.”

  Then it was on to Kim’s first husband, and several of Kim’s other boyfriends, whom, she suggested, Kim had always had problems with. And because of those problems, she insisted, her parents “essentially” had to raise Kim’s kids—including Rebecca—themselves.

  After discussing briefly how the litigation process surrounding the custody of Rebecca had been initiated, she talked about Rebecca’s living conditions and the visitation dispute that had erupted between Buzz and Kim and the Carpenters—plus, being a lawyer, she began helping out her parents.

  “Did you want custody of Rebecca?”

  “No, no.”

  “Have you ever wanted custody of Rebecca?”

  “No, no.”

  “And after you moved [out of your parents’ house]…how frequently did you see Rebecca during the years after you moved?”

  “After I moved, I really—I couldn’t put a number on it. I would—my mom would have fights with me because I think it was in 1993 when I missed [Rebecca’s] birthday party, and I was supposed to bring the cake and I was late and I missed the birthday party. So I know I would not see her frequently because there were often arguments, and my mom would say, ‘Why aren’t you here? Why aren’t you doing this?’ I was going out. I was young. I was trying to start off doing my own thing.

  “I couldn’t put a number on how many times I saw her—not very frequently.”

  If nothing else, this was a complete playing down of her role in Rebecca’s life. Rebecca was born in August 1990. By August 1993, Beth Ann had told several people about the bitter battle brewing between Buzz and her family for child custody, and she made it a daily part of her conversations with people in her inner circle—many of whom had already testified that there wasn’t a moment during that period when she hadn’t talked about getting custody of Rebecca. In fact, on August 16, 1993, she had been present at a court hearing in which Buzz acted as Kim’s attorney, and later, after the hearing, she threatened his life.

  According to a court employee, she had said to Buzz, “I’ll kill your ass.”

  To say that she wasn’t that involved in Rebecca’s life at that time and was “off doing [her] own thing” was a ridiculous exaggeration at least, a lie at best.

  She admitted next to speaking about the custody issue and court proceedings while working at Clein’s office, but she made it sound as if she had mentioned it briefly in passing. “And if things came up, I would talk about it just like everybody talks about the things that’s going on in their families or household.”

  “How many superior court hearings were there concerning Rebecca…?”

  Beth Ann didn’t hesitate or even think about her answer, darting off dates with flawless accuracy. “April sixth and August sixteenth.”

  “Both in ’93?”

  “Yes. One was in Norwich and one was in New London.”

  “And did you attend both of them?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Why were you there on April 6, 1993?”

  “To support my family.”

  “Why were you there on August sixteenth?”

  “To support my family.”

  “By the way, did you have any skirmish with Buzz or anybody else on either of these occasions?”

  “Absolutely not. No!”

  There were several witnesses who could testify differently—and they had already been interviewed by police. Some were even officers of the court. Were they liars, too? many were wondering.

  When Keefe asked her if she had seen any visible signs of abuse on Rebecca, Beth Ann said, “I never saw any evidence of abuse whatsoever.”

  Again, just about every person close to her had disagreed. Not to mention that no fewer than three witnesses had already testified how she had talked about the abuse almost daily. Kane and McShane took notes like reporters as she spoke. Surely, the day’s transcripts would make for some interesting late-night reading.

  For Keefe, there was no way of getting around the fact that Clein had said Beth Ann had, point-blank, asked him to have Buzz killed one night. So Keefe decided to address the situation head-on.

  “You heard Haiman Clein testify…that you approached him and asked him to kill Buzz. You heard him say that?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “He said first you asked him to do it personally. You heard him say that?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Did you do that?”

  “No!”

  “He also said he refused to do it, certainly, so you said hire somebody or get someone else to do it, or words to that effect. You heard that?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Did you do that?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “Was there any reason that you would want Buzz dead?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  About an hour before lunch, Keefe asked Beth Ann about Clein’s drug use—she said she didn’t know much about it—and how their relationship progressed from coworkers to lovers over a period of about a year. Then he had her explain away the notion that she knew Mark Despres. She admitted to being at the Christmas party in 1993 when Despres and Clein began plotting Buzz’s murder. And she also said it was possible that she had even seen or met Despres at the party. She insisted, though, on having no “independent recollection” of any such meeting.

  Then Keefe moved on to the infamous photograph of Buzz that Clein had said she gave him.

  “Did you ever give [Clein] such a photograph?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “Now, did you have photographs of Kim and Buzz?”

  “I have boxes of family photographs at my house.”

  “And they were kept where at your house?”

  She explained that all of her family photographs were kept in a closet at her condo, which gave the jury some explanation possibly as to how Clein could have gotten his hands on the photograph without her knowledge.

  “Now, you say that Haiman had keys to your apartment?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “And did he have them for the months preceding the murder of Buzz?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “And you say that Haiman…Did he visit your apartment at will?”

  “Yes!”

  “Whether you were there or not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he have access to everything in your apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  With that out of the way, there was one more, little obstacle Keefe had to get around: if Beth Ann hadn’t contracted for the murder, why in the world would she have stayed with Clein and continued an intimate relationship with him after he admitted to her that he had Buzz murdered on his own?

  She wasn’t denying that she knew about the murder after the fact; she was denying that she’d had anything to do with it.

  “Do you remember what part of the weekend it was that Clein told you that he had arranged the murder?”

  It had been a little over eight years since Buzz’s murder, but Beth Ann didn’t hesitate or think about her answer.

  “It was a Sunday.”

  Keefe asked her if she remembered what time of day it was.

  “It was toward the evening. It was dark, darkish hours. It wasn’t bright out.”

  She then explained how it was the first time she had heard that Clein indeed had something to do with Buzz’s murder.

  “What was you reaction?”

  “I didn’t want to believe it. I said, ‘Please, please, tell me this isn’t true.’ And he was laughing and he was gloating, and he thought…he had done this great thing. And I was just, ‘You have to be crazy. You can’t do this. Can’t be true.�
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  “Did he tell you why he had murdered Buzz?”

  “He said, ‘Don’t you see? You don’t have to worry about anything anymore.’ He said [Buzz] was just a ‘scumbag,’ and that he had done the world a service.”

  After lunch recess, Keefe had Beth Ann discuss in a bit more detail the litigation process between the Carpenters and Kim and Buzz regarding Rebecca. When Keefe asked her about Dee Clinton’s having testified that she had called Kim a whore, she denied it. When Keefe began to talk about Joseph Jebran, she wrote the relationship off as a brother-sister type of friendship. She said she had tried to make it more romantic, but the feelings just weren’t there.

  “Did you ever ask Joseph Jebran to take you and Rebecca and run away anyplace?”

  “Never.”

  “Now, Beth, did you develop a friendship with Tricia Gaul?”

  “I would call it more of an acquaintance, not a friendship. I mean, we went out once or twice maybe.”

  So not only were Haiman Clein and Dee Clinton liars, but, according to Beth Ann, Joseph Jebran and Tricia Gaul also had walked into a court of law, raised their hands, taken an oath and proceeded to lie, too. Moreover, why did she bring Tricia Gaul to Washington, DC, when she had been admitted to the bar, if she was merely an acquaintance?

  For a good part of the afternoon, Beth Ann denied just about everything negative anyone had said about her. Where Clein was concerned, there wasn’t anything that she would fess up to besides being obsessed with him. She said time and again that the reason she had stayed with Clein so long after the murder was because she had become codependent. She felt she couldn’t live without him—that is, until she decided to turn him into the FBI while he was on the run when she was in England.

  After Beth Ann played down her trip to England and Ireland as a mere working and education experience, Keefe ended his direct examination of her by asking if she had been confined to her parents’ home under house arrest.

  “That is correct, yeah.”

  One of the most remarkable aspects of Beth Ann’s direct testimony was that there wasn’t one time where she hadn’t remembered a fact or incident. She had displayed to the jury a computerlike memory, even about events that had taken place some twenty years earlier. She answered questions with succinct, direct phrasing: dates, times, places, names. There was nothing, it seemed, Beth Ann had a problem recalling.

  That, however, was all about to change.

  Kevin Kane was a peaceful man. Scholarly-looking right down to his owlish glasses and Santa Claus–like white eyebrows and mustache, Kane spoke softly, rarely ever raising his voice or showing excitement. Some years ago, he’d prosecuted one of the most prolific serial killers the state of Connecticut had ever put on trial: Michael Ross, a sadistic sexual predator who had raped and murdered several young women and laughed about it afterward. Kane and Peter McShane had been instrumental in bringing Ross up on charges and, during a retrial, sending him to death row.

  Beth Ann Carpenter, though, was no Michael Ross. Kane had to be careful. He couldn’t come across as being overbearing and aggressive. The jury might take it the wrong way.

  Because Keefe had left off with Beth Ann explaining her “trip” overseas, Kane thought it pertinent to stay on point.

  “You were going to come home from Christmas break and then return to London, is that correct?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “You told other people you were going to go home for Christmas break?”

  “Haiman was a fugitive!”

  “Excuse me? Could you answer that, yes or no? You did not come home for Christmas break?”

  “I can’t answer that without an explanation.”

  “Did you come home in December 1995?”

  “I was assisting the authorities in 1995—”

  The judge broke in. “Answer the question, please.”

  “No, I did not come home.”

  Over the next few minutes, Kane showed clearly that Beth Ann never had any intention of coming home once she stepped foot on British soil. When asked if she had ever heard that Mark Despres had been arrested, she said yes.

  “And did you know that he had been arrested on October twenty-eight?”

  “I’m not sure that I knew the date.”

  “When did you first hear that?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  For a good part of the afternoon, Kane stayed on the subject of her living in London and, later, Ireland. He wanted to know why immigration wouldn’t let her back into England after she had gone to the Canary Islands.

  “I don’t recall.”

  Then he wanted to know how she got back into the country.

  Smirking, she said, “A plane.”

  “And in what airport did you land?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “Was it Stansted Airport?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “You don’t recall…. How many airports are there in the London area?”

  “I believe there’s four.”

  “Well, you landed at an airport, I take it?”

  “Yes.”

  At about 4:45 P.M., court was suspended for the day after Keefe objected to a line of questioning that was geared toward why Beth Ann Carpenter wouldn’t talk to Scotland Yard officials about Buzz’s death, but was willing to aid in the capture of Haiman Clein.

  The first thing Wednesday morning, April 3, 2002, Beth Ann took the stand again. So far, it hadn’t gone all that badly. There were no sudden emotional breakdowns or tirades or controversial bouts of testimony. It was, when it came down to it, her word against, well, just about every witness the state’s attorney’s office had presented to the court.

  At first, she continued testifying about her time abroad. Kane wanted the jury to believe that she had left the country to avoid arrest and, later, the death penalty, and Keefe, of course, thought he’d already proved differently.

  When Kane began asking her about the context of the phone calls she was receiving from Clein while he was on the run, she again said that she couldn’t “recall.”

  “Now, in November of ’95,” Kane asked about twenty minutes into his cross-examination, “end of October, early November, who did you first hear from that Mark Despres was arrested?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “You don’t recall?” Kane asked in disbelief. Then he posed the obvious next question, “Was that something that at all was any concern to you about Mark Despres’s being arrested for the murder of your brother-in-law?”

  “It was of some concern, yes.”

  “But not enough…for you to be able to now remember when you first heard he was arrested?”

  “I don’t recall….”

  Sometime later, Kane asked, “And can you tell us what you recall Haiman telling you about a warrant being issued for him?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  Kane then established that Clein had phoned her most of the time, not the other way around.

  “And can you tell us…what he told you?”

  “As I said, I don’t recall what he said.”

  “You don’t recall what he said?”

  “No.”

  A bit later, “Okay, what did you say to him…?”

  “What did I say to him?”

  “Yes!”

  “I don’t recall what I said to him.”

  Kane continued to question her about the substance of the phone calls, but she continued to say, over and over, “I don’t recall.” It was odd, many in the gallery said later, that she had a way of recalling issues of no significance and failing to recall issues that could be of help to the jury. For example, Kane wanted to know if she recalled telling Ali, the man she had worked for and lived with in London, that Buzz had been murdered. “I don’t recall.” What about telling Ali about the arrest of Mark Despres? “I don’t recall.”

  Throughout the morning, Kane tried to get her to admit that she knew more than she was saying, but she wouldn’t
budge. Then he began to talk about Buzz’s kids, Briana and Anson.

  “You knew that at the time Buzz was killed, your sister, Kim, was pregnant, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Whenever Kane talked about the investigation portion of the case, asking her what types of questions investigators had asked her early on, she said she didn’t recall.

  It was obviously turning into a worthless struggle to get Beth Ann to say anything useful or important. She would talk about insignificant factoids all day long, but when it came down to anything that might shed a negative light on her…“I don’t recall.”

  After being on the stand for nearly two days, about six hours of which were under cross-examination, Beth Ann had said “I don’t recall” to Kevin Kane approximately seventy times.

  Under Hugh Keefe’s direct questioning, however, she hadn’t uttered the same phrase once.

  “It was almost as if two different people were on the stand,” a courtroom observer later said. “One on direct examination who had an excellent memory—and another on cross-examination who had amnesia!”

  Chapter 50

  A hearing took place on Thursday, April 4, 2002, regarding Dr. Robert Novelly, a psychologist whom Keefe wanted to testify about the behaviors of people who suffer from codependency syndrome. According to the defense, Beth Ann had stayed with Clein after she knew he’d had Buzz murdered because she was obsessed with him, and she needed him in her life to make her feel whole.

  Kane argued that testimony about the syndrome was not recognized under state law and therefore should not be admitted.

  In front of Judge Devlin, without the jury present, Novelly said that Beth Ann “may have” suffered from codependency, but he could not be positive.

  Ultimately Judge Devlin said Novelly’s testimony wasn’t relevant and wouldn’t help the jury in reaching its verdict.

  Mark Despres was intoxicated with the notion of meddling in the process of justice any way he could. Rumor around the courthouse during the afternoon of April 4 was that Despres, whom Keefe wanted brought in to see if he would testify, was going to “go nuts” once he got into the courtroom. Despres had been acting erratically during the past few years—setting up, many believed, an insanity defense for himself. He had claimed he was psychiatrically impaired and suffered from several mental disorders. At times, he refused to bathe himself and was on a cocktail of medications. Thus far, however, there was little factual proof of his being mentally disturbed.