Finding Amy

by Joseph K. Loughlin

  Jamie Baillargeon was Gorman's ex-girlfriend. She testified that she had dated him for about a year and broken up with him around the beginning of September 2001. She testified to several conversations with Gorman about the disappearance of Amy St. Laurent. On the day after Amy disappeared, Gorman called Jamie, told her he'd met a girl downtown, gone to an after-hours party with her, and taken her back downtown at the end of the night. Subsequently, he called her again after he had gone to Alabama, and Jamie said that his story didn't make sense. At that point, Gorman told her that he hadn't dropped Amy off. That Jason and Kush had dropped her off, that they were gone for approximately three hours and returned with blood on their hands and asked him how much he loved his mother, his sisters, and Jamie. Jamie testified that Gorman told her his roommates made him go to the police.

  She testified that she then had a third phone conversation with Gorman after Amy St. Laurent's body was found, because she was troubled by Gorman's earlier conversation. It wasn't like him, she said, to take a threat and not do anything about it. In this last conversation, she asked him why Amy's body had been found in his backyard, and he told her that Jason and Kush had asked where a good place would be to put her.

  LAROCHELLE: Did he tell you how long after Amy had died that they had decided that they had to find a place to put Amy?

  BAILLARGEON: A couple of days.

  LAROCHELLE: Now when he said this to you, did you believe it?

  BAILLARGEON: I wanted to. I didn't.

  LAROCHELLE: What occurred to you when he told you that he had told them where they could put her body behind his house … ?

  BAILLARGEON: It made me sick that he had known where she was. How he could not say anything, that she had a family and all.

  LAROCHELLE: Did you ask him about that?

  BAILLARGEON: I asked him if he felt bad and he said he didn't really care.

  On cross, Strike asked her if she had broken up with Russ because he had been cheating on her. When she answered yes, he asked, Are you mad at Russell?

  At that point, Jamie collapsed in tears, the court recessed, and the jury was excused.

  Pending the recall of Tammy Westbrook, the state's final witness was Sergeant Jon Goodman, who had picked up Gorman, Jason Cook, and Kush Sharma in the Old Port and brought them to the police station the night the police first learned of Amy's disappearance. Goodman reported that Gorman had told him he had given Amy a ride to the Pavilion on Middle Street and that he had done that all by himself and that he had dropped her off there at 1:45 a.m.

  LAROCHELLE: And how did that strike you?

  GOODMAN: It struck me—and I asked well, where did she go when you dropped her off? He said that she—actually first I asked if there were people around when he dropped her off and he said there were people around and I said well, did she go with them or where did she go? And he said oh, she just went inside of the club, and it struck me immediately because he said 1:45 and the bar closes at 1:00 o'clock and really quarter of, but usually by 1:15 or 1:20 at night, there is nobody around there at all. The doors are locked and if there are employees there, there is no one to be seen, so I asked him to confirm that it was 1:45 and that she went into the club and he said yes, that she walked in and it was about 1:45.

  Following Sergeant Goodman's testimony, Tammy Westbrook was again called to the stand, and Strike began the cross-examination that had been postponed earlier.

  When Strike examines her, she actually giggles as she testifies to urinating on a cell phone once while talking to her son. What does this tell the jury? What effect will it have on how they analyze Gorman's confession? Another courtroom moment when I really feel my revulsion for these people.

  Dan and Scott, Amy's constant guardians, maintain their composure like centurions.

  I am relieved when Stokes comes back with fire. “How would you know that Amy St. Laurent was shot in the head on December 9 when the autopsy had not even been conducted yet?” The police didn't even know that!

  Frustrated, she blasts out at the police and others. “I am not a complete lunatic.” Okay, Tammy, how about half a lunatic? In regard to her son, she delivers the calling card of the guilty nationwide. “He is being persecuted. I am being persecuted. By the police. By the press.”

  It was an intense, electric, yet deeply sad day.

  At the end of the afternoon, following a lengthy examination of Tammy Westbrook calling into question her stability and paranoid state of mind, examinations of Ryan Campbell's flaky, ever changing story of his lost gun, and Matt Despins's attempts to assist the police, the defense rested. The jury was excused one more time, sent home with the knowledge that in the morning they would receive their instructions and begin debating the fate of Jeffrey “Russ” Gorman.

  After a long and exhausting week, detectives, attorneys, and families headed out in the dark of a January afternoon, full of restlessness and unease. Prosecution and defense went home to prepare their final arguments. Detectives went home veering between “We've got him” and “Is it enough? Is there something more we could have done?” Amy's family went home full of trepidation and prayers for a conviction and closure.

  Chapter Twenty

  Friday, January 17, 2003. Trial day number five. No one had slept well. Meeting with the lawyers before court began, Amy's family was frayed with tension and taut with anxiety. This was the day the police and the prosecutors had been working toward for more than a year. The day that the family had longed for and dreaded. The very air had an electric intensity as people gathered and filed into the courtroom.

  Once the prosecution and the defense made their closing arguments, the jury would be charged and would begin debating Gorman's fate.

  The Portland Press Herald reported that Tammy Westbrook had been the star witness for both the prosecution and the defense. A woman who painfully testified about her son's confession or a troubled, delusional, and vindictive mother. A mother whose doubts about her son's story had led her to demand, and get, the truth, or a paranoid and unstable woman who believed the phones were tapped, had once urinated on one to extinguish a call she didn't like, and who took a phalanx of powerful drugs including antipyschotics to get through her days.

  Justice Nancy Mills, a tough and formal judge who ran a tight courtroom, addressed the jury, beginning to give them the instructions that would guide them in reaching their verdict. She was careful, thorough, thoughtful, and precise. “Your job,” she told them, “is to find the facts, which means you're going to decide what happened in this case back in October and November and December of 2001 and the beginning of 2002. You're going to do that by analyzing the evidence and by determining what evidence you find believable. You will reach your verdict by applying the law that I'll now give to you to the facts that you find and you should not be concerned about the consequences of any verdict you may reach.”

  To guide the jury in analyzing the case, she explained what they might consider—the sworn testimony of all the witnesses, including the grand jury testimony they had heard by tape, all the exhibits in the case, and the stipulation of the attorneys. If the jury found that certain facts had been proved beyond a reasonable doubt, the evidence might also consist of any reasonable inferences that could be drawn from those proven facts.

  The term “reasonable inference,” she told them, was another term for circumstantial evidence. “Circumstantial evidence is indirect evidence, proof of a chain of facts from which you can find that another fact exists even though it has not been proved directly.” Explaining that making reasonable inferences was a process they used every day, she gave them the following example:

  “If you go to bed at night and just before you go to bed you look out the window and you see green grass. That's a fact that you have seen, that's a direct fact that the grass is green. You go to bed, you sleep all night and you wake up in the morning and you look out that same window and instead of grass, you see snow everywhere … the reasonable inference that you can make … is that du
ring the night it snowed.”

  Justice Mills instructed the jury about judging the credibility of witnesses and how to analyze discrepancies and inconsistencies. She told them that the defendant had an absolute right not to testify and that no inferences could be drawn from that. That they could believe some portions of a witness's testimony and not others. She told them that in addition to determining what evidence was credible, they must determine whether sufficient credible evidence had been introduced to prove the state's case beyond a reasonable doubt. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt, she told them, was proof of guilt sufficient to give them a conscientious belief that the charge against the defendant was almost certainly true.

  It was the state's duty to prove that the defendant had acted knowingly or intentionally, but the state had no obligation to prove motive. In the event that the state failed to prove that Gorman had acted knowingly or intentionally, Justice Mills also gave the jury an instruction about manslaughter. “A person is guilty of manslaughter if he recklessly or with criminal negligence causes the death of another human being.”

  They were excellent instructions, yet every word that raised the possibility of reasonable doubt or uncertainty, or suggested the jury could find Gorman guilty of manslaughter rather than murder, or not guilty, reverberated painfully with the detectives and Amy's family. With the detectives, in particular, because they had all been there before. They had sat through trials and had juries in other cases come back with bad verdicts. They knew that even in a strong, well-tried case, no matter how hard they'd worked or how thorough and careful they'd been, there were still elements of a crapshoot in sending a case to a jury. And this wasn't just any case. This was Amy's case.

  The collective sense of everyone holding their breath continued as the attorneys began their final arguments. Fern LaRochelle went first, leading the jury step by step through the evidence. On the night Amy St. Laurent disappeared, Gorman told at least two people, and later told the police, that it was his intention to have sex with her. Her body was found without pants and with her underwear rolled down, suggesting at least an attempted sexual assault. He was the last person seen with her. She was shot through the head, and several people had testified that Gorman had access to a gun.

  Continuing in his calm and careful way, Fern LaRochelle reminded the jury of Gorman's lie about the timeline and the facts that showed he was lying. The Westbrook traffic stop showed that he was out on the road alone at 3:14 a.m. and back in the apartment by between 4:00 and 4:30, not out in the woods burying her. The delay in burial was confirmed by the forensic entomologist and by the warden's testimony about the behavior of the cadaver dogs.

  He asked the jury who would want to bury a body so it wouldn't be found? A person who could be connected with her, that's who. A person concerned about concealing evidence. And why was she buried at that location? Because that was where she was killed. Practically in his backyard, in an area that he knew very well. How likely would it be that a random killer would choose that small portion of Scarborough to bury his victim?

  He invited them to look at the testimony of Gorman's mother. She says that, on December 9 at 2:30 in the afternoon, he told her that he had shot Amy in the head. At 2:30 in the afternoon on December 9, the medical examiner was just finishing the autopsy and hadn't yet concluded that it was a gunshot wound. His mother knew before Dr. Greenwald, the medical examiner, and the police how Amy St. Laurent had died. How did the mother know that the body wasn't immediately buried, that it was buried three days later? Not because she had the services of a forensic entomologist or a game warden with a trained cadaver dog. She was told by the defendant. By her son.

  LaRochelle reminded them of Gorman's conversation with Robert Milton, manager of the Game Room. Gorman told Milton they would not find the body. They've got no evidence. How would he know? The police can talk to Gorman until the cows come home and if there is no body, there is no crime. LaRochelle told the jury that the location of the body was so significant with respect to the identity of the person who had killed Amy St. Laurent that when Amy was found, Gorman changed his story. He told his ex-girlfriend Jamie that Kush and Jason had killed Amy and threatened him unless he told them of a good place to put her. He told Jamie that he had known all along where Amy's body was.

  Gorman's own mother testified that it was her son's changing stories that aroused her suspicions. He'd told her the Pavilion story. He'd told her the Kush and Jason story. When she pressed him for the truth, he confessed to her that he killed Amy. He shot her in the head and went back three days later to bury her. Succinctly, methodically, and in an extremely believable way, LaRochelle summed up for the jury what they had heard. He showed them maps demonstrating the proximity of the grave site to Gorman's mother's house.

  After a short break, Clifford Strike began his closing argument. The family and the detectives listened, if anything, more closely than they had to Fern LaRochelle. Strike began by reminding the jury that the standard of proof was “beyond a reasonable doubt,” repeating the words “reasonable doubt,” and that they, as jurors, were the keepers of that standard. He then began to show the jury how the state's weak case wouldn't get them beyond a reasonable doubt.

  “The case that the state has presented for you this week is a strictly circumstantial case,” Strike told them. “We have no murder weapon, we have no ballistics, no bullet, there is no DNA evidence. We don't know what time she was killed, we don't know where she killed, we don't know what date she was killed.

  “We do know that Ms. St. Laurent died of a gunshot wound to the head. That's a fact.” Strike spoke about the traffic stop in Westbrook. He said that at 3:14 in the morning, Mr. Gorman was in Westbrook, and he was alone. That the officer who stopped him noticed nothing unusual except that Gorman was a little nervous. He used the map to support his statement that the burial site was not in Tammy Westbrook's “backyard.”

  Strike reminded the jury that Gorman and his roommates all told the police that he had been gone only fifteen or twenty minutes and suggested there was nothing to say that Mr. Gorman didn't drive over to Westbrook afterward to see if anything was happening at the Game Room. Pointing out the inconsistencies in the various stories given, Strike told the jury that just about every witness testified to multiple stories or multiple pieces of the story of what happened that night. He reminded the jury that the tote road was six hundred feet long and that it was pitch black on the night the investigators dug up Amy St. Laurent's body. That the tote road was choked with debris. He argued that Gorman couldn't have taken Amy down that road for a walk, killed her, and still been stopped in his car by Officer Gardiner at the time he was. Nor would Gorman have appeared calm.

  About Gorman cleaning his car, Strike told the jury, everyone cleans cars, and fifteen to twenty minutes isn't detailing. He pointed out that the police tore Gorman's car apart and didn't find any evidence of a crime. That other than the testimony of Travis Gilbert, a thief, no one ever saw Gorman with a gun. That the police never found any evidence on the shovel.

  With respect to Tammy Westbrook, Strike pointed out that she was delusional, was taking powerful medicines, and was under a doctor's care. She believed that her phones were tapped and helicopters were flying over her house spying on her and her children. As for the statements she made to the grand jury, she could have created them from rumors that she'd heard. Look at what Westbrook said—that her son had taken four hits of acid and had been drinking—and yet when the police officer stopped Gorman there was no evidence of intoxication. Even if you were to believe Westbrook's testimony, Strike went on, if Gorman snapped, blacked out, was on acid and drinking, then your verdict has to be manslaughter.

  Strike also suggested that Westbrook could have believed the story she told because of her mental problems and her long-term history of a love/hate relationship with her son. Alternating throwing things at him, exploding at him, and kicking him out of the house with inviting him back and sending him money. Finally, Strike told the
jury that the fact that the body was buried didn't signify anything. Whoever shot Amy St. Laurent would not want her found.

  After a brief rebuttal by LaRochelle, the judge dismissed the three alternate jurors and continued with her instructions. She told the jury that it was her job to decide the law that applied, their job to decide credibility and the facts. That they must not allow their emotions or any feelings of prejudice or sympathy to play any part in their verdict. That they had a duty to be businesslike.

  As everyone stood and the jury filed out, Danny Young looked over at Diane and Lucille and he almost started to cry. He realized that after nearly a year and a half of intense, day-to-day involvement, he no longer had any control over what was happening with the case. Even when it was going to trial, and control had passed from the detectives to the prosecutors, he had still worked closely with Fern and Bill and had been very much a part of it. Now control had passed from all their hands into the hands of those twelve people.

  I am worried based on my experience with juries. You just never know. I look over at Danny, at Scott, at Fern and Bill. Everyone is tired. It has been a long, difficult week and we are still clenched with tension as Fern gets up to make his closing argument. He is great—calm, patient, brilliant, his inflection perfect as he makes his points about the testimony—the map, the timeline of events, the grand jury testimony, the location of the body. I want to scream out, “Well done, Fern, well done!”

  We listen nervously to Strike. Reasonable doubt, no evidence, no DNA, timeline is off because of roommates and other witnesses. He attacks the grand jury testimony as illegal and tells them they must find reasonable doubt. The pressure on the jury is tremendous. I can see it in their faces.

  Justice Mills instructs the jury with poise and skill and a professional directness. Please God give us justice, I think, as they slowly file out, moving together like a caterpillar.