"You have indicated to us that you read something in the newspapers concerning this matter, is that correct?" another juror was asked, when the motions were denied.
"When it first came out, yes."
"Did you read it on more than one day?" "No."
"Do you recall whether you saw pictures in connection with it at that time?"
"No, I didn't."
"You say you did not hear about it on radio?" "No."
"Nor on television?"
"No."
Two days later Gregory Powell was trying a trick he had been advised of in the high power tank by inmate jailhouse lawyers.
"The defendant informed me, your Honor," said Moore, "that just before we came out of your chambers where we had been discussing some informal matters, the bailiff, the deputy sheriff standing in the courtroom, twisted his arm and tore from his hand a cigarette which he had, this all being done in the presence of the jury."
"I told him to extinguish the cigarette," the bailiff said, "because court was going to convene, and he refused. And I said, 'If you don't put it out, I'll have to take it from you,' and he said, 'If you're going to take it from me, go ahead.' I reached for the cigarette. I didn't touch his hand at all. And the cigarette fell into the trash can and was extinguished."
"For the record, I will ask for a mistrial," said Moore, "and I will challenge the panel of jurors in the courtroom on the basis of what they may have seen or did see. It may have the effect of prejudicing them against this defendant and prevent him from having a fair and impartial trial."
"I would like to join in that motion," Ray Smith said.
On July 11, before leaving his apartment for the homicide squad room where he was now waiting each day for the jury selection to end, Karl looked fearfully at Helen's enormous stomach.
"I wish I could stay home with you. I wish they'd give me a few days off."
"I'll be all right, Karl. You just stay close to a phone."
"No pains?"
"I'm okay," Helen smiled, and she indeed looked fine that morning. She'd gotten up early and her light brown hair was combed. She was wearing lipstick.
"I should be worrying about you instead of this trial."
"Don't worry about anything, Karl. I'll be all right. If I need you I'll phone."
"If anything should happen. . . I mean before. . ."
"Yes. Yes. I'll call the doctor. Or an ambulance. Or a cop."
And so he left for the police building, somewhat reassured. He rode his motorcycle to better get through the traffic.
Later that day something did happen. Pain. Sudden, devastating, unbelievable. And Helen Hettinger called the police department and, left a message. Then she found herself struck down, half on the floor and half on the bed. Her hazel eyes were round with fear. It wasn't supposed to happen like this, not like this!
Helen fought for the bed and pulled herself over on her back. Another call was impossible. This was as far as she would get. The thrashing, pitiless thing within her was demanding to be free.
The young woman breathed deeply and bit her knuckles and concentrated on not screaming in panic, on saving the life of the thing she was sure would kill her.
Helen tried to prepare, and she raised up and looked down but the tears and sweat were blinding. She was wiping her eyes when the real pain struck.
Karl and Pierce Brooks were having coffee in the police cafeteria that morning. Karl was sitting silently as usual. Brooks was worrying that he looked thinner and more tense with each passing week.
"Have some more coffee, Karl."
"No thanks."
"How about a doughnut?"
"I'm not very hungry."
"Gets to be a drag sitting around waiting to be called over to court."
"Yes it does."
"Guess you'll be glad to get back to regular duty."
"I guess so."
"Pretty good break about you driving for the chief. You'll make sergeant first time you're eligible."
Karl smiled and glanced around the cafeteria and through the windows out into the burning smog filled sky. Yes, quite a break, he thought. But why did I get it?.
"Telephone for Officer Hettinger," said the cashier's voice over the microphone, and Karl left Brooks, only to return a moment later, his face gone white.
"My wife. Helen . . ."
"The baby?" said Brooks.
But Karl was gone, running to the elevator, in a few moments speeding down the freeway, talking aloud to himself: "I can't . . . Oh, my God, I can't even be there when my wife . . . what good am . . . Oh, my God."
Twenty minutes later he was stumbling over the steps, bursting through the door and falling breathlessly into the bedroom.
And there was Helen. She was smiling at him, beads of perspiration on her forehead and lip. She was pale but she was smiling so that he wouldn't panic. The bed was soaked. They were covered only by a sheet, the two of them. Helen and the red naked baby she herself had delivered, which lay on Helen's stomach still joined to her mother by the uncut lifeline she no longer needed.
"Say hello to your daughter," said Helen. "Her name is Laura."
"I've gotta go to the bathroom," said Karl.
On the fifteenth day of July the jury was picked.
The jury panel members were certainly not atypical, thought Pierce Brooks. It was a fair representation of one's peers perhaps, if one could possibly have lived in the Los Angeles area without reading a newspaper, or seeing television, or listening to a radio. If one had nothing better to do than endure a trial which would certainly last two months at least, enjoyed being sequestered, had little or nothing at home to be sequestered from. If one was not a professional man, nor high-salaried, nor prominent, it was quite possible to get a jury of one's peers.
Yes, thought Brooks, it was an ordinary jury and as such would be capricious, unpredictable, naive, totally ignorant of law and justice and violence and violent men, crime and the criminal. The responses to what the jurors would hear in this case would be conditioned not by life, nor even by books or newspapers-I just glance through them-but by movies. And that, thought the detective, was the most insidious enemy of justice itself as far as a jury is concerned. It has to be true! I can believe it! Because I saw in this movie one time . . .
Karl Hettinger was to wait another week before he was to testify. There were other witnesses, many of them: pawnbrokers who sold the killers the guns, liquor store and market clerks who faced those cocked and loaded guns.
Despite the air conditioning, the big courtroom was hot. The paint was peeling near the ceiling, and people had carved their names into the wooden seats. Karl sat and absently read the names and hardly heard the beginning of the bickering.
"Even Gregory Powell can buy a gun in Nevada?" said Schulman concluding the direct examination of a pawnbroker.
"I object, as argumentative, sarcastic, and facetious," said Ray Smith.
"We request that the district attorney be cited for misconduct and we move for a mistrial at this time," said Moore.
"I withdraw the question," said Schulman.
Karl heard many motions that week:
"I will ask for a continuance until tomorrow morning," said Moore. "Mr. Powell has apparently received some information which has affected his mental state at this time."
"This man is on trial for killing a policeman," said Schulman, "and I think we should proceed unless there is some strong justification for the continuance beyond a 'Dear John' letter or something of the kind."
"We are getting sick and tired of Mr. Schulman coming over to our side of the floor and pointing out the defendant all the time," said Moore. "We are sick and tired of Mr. Schulman holding papers in his hand and approaching witnesses with papers."
"Mr. Moore goes on into a long dissertation about what he is sick and tired of which bothers me not at all. I don't care one way or the other what he is sick and tired of," said Schulman, hitching up his pants in what the defense maintained was a bellige
rent gesture.
And still more motions as Gregory Powell proceeded with his escape plans.
"In what way are you being prejudiced by the fact that you cannot just interview witnesses in the county jail without the presence of your attorney?" asked Judge Brandler suspiciously.
Finally, in late July, Karl Hettinger was called to the stand. The jurors and indeed the entire courtroom was absolutely quiet when he described the killing, and the escape, and the hunt, interrupted only by specific questions by Marshall Schulman. Toward the end Schulman let the witness narrate, and only the husky voice of the witness and the whir of the air conditioner and a persistent buzzing fly interrupted the breathless silence. The witness faltered often, and every juror, every spectator, and especially every man at the counsel table leaned forward, riot to miss a word. The direct testimony was making two jurors begin to weep which in turn was making the prosecutor fear a mistrial.
"When I got back to the shooting scene I saw that ... I saw that Ian was lying in a ditch face down. I didn't go over to him. The sheriff and the ambulance drivers went over to him. And I saw ... I saw what appeared to be drag marks on the ground . . . quite a bit of blood leading . . . this appeared to be leading from a spot where I had last seen him. . . had last seen Ian fall on the ground, over toward the ditch. The ambulance drivers put Ian in the ambulance, and I got in the ambulance also, and we drove into Bakersfield, and I entered the hospital there ... I don't know where Ian went."
"Your Honor, I am going to go into another long phase. I wonder if this might be a convenient time for a recess," said Marshall Schulman. "The witness seems distraught."
Karl Hettinger's testimony was also disturbing to defendant Jimmy Smith, terrified him in fact, and while the jury was still in recess he leaped to his feet to address the court.
"Look, your Honor, I have stood up several times in this courtroom. I don't know how to talk to explain myself properly. I mean, I'm not an idiot, or whatever my attorney claims I am. I've been tryin to ask this man to ... I don't want him for my attorney anymore. He comes back from the bench here now and tells me that the district attorney is gonna prove . . . that he has got some kind of a theory, or ballistics, or somethin, that I fired shots into the man's body. And I asked him again, 'Do you believe what I am tellin you? Do you believe that I did commit the crime or not?' He don't answer me. In other words, he don't believe me. I might as well defend myself as to have him sit here for me, and it don't do any good and I'm goin to the gas chamber anyway. I might as well do it myself as to have him do it.
"He told me, 'I don't know, Jimmy, how're we gonna prove it? It looks bad. There's nothin I can do.' And this. And that. What can I do with a man like this defendin me for my life?"
"If I understand," said Judge Brandler, "this is a motion again to have Mr. Ray Smith relieved as your attorney of record, is that right?"
"Motion? What good does it do me? What good does it do me to ask? I'm already in Death Row now. So just forget about it. Go ahead and take me up, because that's what all of you are gonna do. I understand perfectly what I'm sayin, your Honor. It's just too obvious ... I don't know what this is. I don't understand it. . . ." Jimmy sat and his lip quivered as he held a sob in his throat. His forehead wrinkled and he resumed his hangdog pose.
"That very statement of yours that you don't understand it, that you don't know what this is, is one of the reasons why the court. . ."
"It's a conspiracy!" shouted Jimmy suddenly.
"The court heretofore and again now refuses to grant your motion that you represent yourself in view of the serious nature of the offenses."
"I don't want him to ever say anything to me as long as I am in this courtroom anymore. I don't want him to have anythin to say to me. No time," said Jimmy Smith, and folded his arms and turned away from his elderly attorney, who shook his white head and shrugged helplessly.
During the cross examination of Karl Hettinger, Attorney Ray Smith asked a rather innocuous series of questions which would be pondered by the witness that night.
"When this case is over and you go back to the Hollywood Station, what are your duties?"
"Upon the completion of this trial, sir, I am going to be permanently assigned downtown to the police building."
"In what capacity?"
"I will be driving for the chief."
"You will be what?"
"Driving for the chief."
"You mean Bill Parker?"
"Yes sir."
"You will not be out in the field any longer?"
"No sir."
Late that night, when as usual he sat before his television drinking beer long after Helen was asleep, Karl glanced in at the baby. She was not red now, but creamy, and stunningly beautiful, he thought. He touched her cheek and then crept back toward the living room to resume his vigil before the lighted screen and the droning voices which lulled him. He seldom knew what the movies were about.
Even civilians can see through it all, thought Karl. The lawyers could see through it. Why would I be picked for that. They're just putting me there to get me off the street, to do it in a nice way. I'm too well known now just to stick me in some ordinary desk job. They think that's where I should be after what I . . . after what they think I . . .
He tried to stop thinking. He sat and stared and drank beer and hoped the dream would not come tonight. The dream which would never awaken him until it was over, but which seldom failed to awaken Helen when she heard him panting and felt his sweating body and saw him there in the dark running through his dream. Flat on his back, his legs pumping, the sobs tearing forth every few seconds.
When she awakened him he would tremble and dry himself and go into the living room to the television.
The first few times Helen followed him in.
"Karl, please tell me!'
"Helen, I told you I don't remember what I was dreaming. I don't even know if I was dreaming."
"Is something . . ."
"Nothing's bothering me."
"Well how can anybody help you? Karl, we've been married almost a year and I don't even know you."
"I'm just a little tense from the trial. I'll be all right."
"Tell me about the dream."
"I told you I don't remember."
"We don't talk, Karl. People have to talk."
"Nothing, Helen, there's nothing . . ."
And she would turn, angry and frustrated, and stalk back to her bed and lie there seething. Then she would feel the soaking sheets where his body had been and the anger would dissolve. Helen Hettinger would feel the fear and doubt creeping through the darkness to envelop her.
She had always known herself to be a strong girl. But Helen's kind of strength-the strength which had seen her through the birth of her daughter-was no match for the baffling unspeakable thing which was stealing her man away, possessing him. She couldn't see it or touch it. She became frightfully aware of her inadequacy. "I'm not smart enough," she would say. "I just don't understand and he won't tell me, can't tell me." She would not be able to sleep for an hour, but she would be asleep long before her husband came to bed.
The next day during cross examination the witness looked only a little more haggard, perhaps darker around the eyes. By now he had begun compulsively digging his nails into his palms. His wife and his sister Miriam noticed. Other than that and the weight loss which showed in his cheeks, he looked pretty much the same.
"Well," said Attorney Ray Smith, "will you please give any explanation you choose to make to this jury as to why on March 12 in front of your police officers there you positively identified Jimmy Lee Smith as having shot bullets into Officer Campbell, and why in this courtroom you have said you could not identify him?"
"Yes sir," said the witness. "As I stated before, I made this in the form of an accusatory statement. I was not under oath then. I believe this is an accepted police procedure."
"What are the physical facts or the movement that leads you to believe that it was Jimmy Le
e Smith who fired those four shots?"
"As I looked back, as I am looking back, the form to the left of the form that is firing down into the body appeared to be moving. And it appeared to be moving from the spot that I last saw the defendant Powell standing in. Due to these circumstances, I am assuming that the figure that is over the body is that of Smith, and it is my assumption that Smith has moved forward also from the spot that he was standing in, and is over the body firing into it."
"That is an assumption on your part, you didn't see it, did you?"
"No sir, I did not see it."
And when the jury was in recess the old attorney felt obliged to address the court with his incessant problem.
"Your Honor, I feel it would probably be appropriate to have some little remark in the record because in the event of an automatic appeal, the Supreme Court, of course, will be reading the entire record. Since the last outburst of Jimmy Smith, he has not talked with me, he refuses to talk with me, he slides his chair over some four or five or six feet to get away from me. Now it is not that he's hurting my feelings by doing that, but I feel that the Supreme Court should know that the condition exists."
"Well, all the court can say is," replied the judge, "that you are very vigorously representing the defendant, and this may be just a part of the defendant Smith's stratagem to attempt to create some possible error or confusion in the record."
The client of Ray Smith arose wearily. His hair was cut so short now he was almost bald, and that coupled with the new glasses gave a mournful look to his soft quiet-spoken way.
"Your Honor, for the past two days I have been fastin and prayin and I haven't had anything to eat. My condition is not real weak, I am not physically sick, but I have been walkin rather slow back and forth between the courtrooms. And this afternoon, I was walkin slow and the two officers told Powell and the other two officers to go ahead, and they grabbed me by my arms and they jerked me and they forcibly ran me down the hallway and manhandled me and twisted me and turned me and shoved me into the bookin room!
"I was only usin a slow motion to conserve my energy, and I would go on to say the reason I am fastin and prayin was on the advice of my mother, I call her my mother, I mean my auntie, Mrs. Iona Edwards."
the Onion Field (1973) Page 28
