the Onion Field (1973)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  Public Defender Charlie Maple, always resourceful and thorough, admitted to a completeness compulsion. When he had first learned that Karl Hettinger had been pensioned off the police force, he subpoenaed the personnel and pension files of the former officer. He had been astonished to learn that the former policeman had resigned under fire on a shoplifting charge.

  The public defender read all of the psychiatric reports. He was by his own admission more "personally involved" in this case than any he had ever tried. He called Dr. George N. Thompson, whose report was so unlike the others. The report that said Karl Hettinger mentioned having been involved in a "gun battle" with two robbery suspects before he started shoplifting.

  "You made a diagnosis," said the judge to Dr. Thompson, "that there is some type of a character disorder involved in this case, which some people might call kleptomania? And you have some mixed feelings as to whether it amounts to kleptomania or not. Is that right?"

  "Well, I wouldn't refer to it as mixed feelings, but that I was attempting to, for the Pension Board, clarify the diagnosis to some extent. And so I discussed it further. That was an afterthought apparently, that one might consider a diagnosis of kleptomania. However, I thought it was probably not true kleptomania."

  "Do you have any recollection," asked Prosecutor Sheldon Brown, "in reading those files, of anything being inconsistent in the file with relation to what Mr. Hettinger told you in the interview?"

  "No."

  "If the court please, I have here a department pension report, city of Los Angeles, and I ask it be marked for identification. Does that report appear to be one that you examined during your preparation of the report on Mr. Hettinger?"

  "Well, I can't recall," said the doctor, "if this was in the file or not. If it was, I can only say that I know this doctor was one of the examiners before the board."

  "If it was in the file then I take it that you would have reviewed it?"

  "Yes."

  "Now you will notice in the clinical history of this report that it's apparently over a year prior to your seeing Mr. Hettinger. It sets forth a statement of facts as to how Mr. Hettinger's partner actually met his death."

  "Yes."

  "Was there a statement in this other report that he and his partner were kidnapped and taken in the vicinity of Bakersfield where his partner was killed and he managed to escape?"

  "Yes."

  Charles Maple was anxious the day he examined Karl Hettinger on the inconsistency he had found in the Thompson report.

  "In discussing the shooting out there in Kern County when Officer Campbell was killed, did you ever tell anyone that you were involved in a gun battle with two robbery suspects? That you and your partner were fighting the two suspects when one of the suspects shot your partner and your partner died?"

  "I don't recall saying those words," said the witness. "Words were said to a medical secretary as to why I was there. She stated words to the effect, 'Was it a gun battle or a robbery?' or something to that effect. I didn't wish to go into it with her, knowing I would be seeing a doctor shortly."

  "What doctor is that you are speaking of?" asked Maple.

  "I don't recall his name."

  "Do you recall what time of year it was?" "No."

  "And did you relate to the doctor your version of what happened up there in Kern County?"

  "I don't recall."

  Out of the presence of the jury Maple argued to the court: "It turns out that he has a prior history of theft that's concealed from the police department. Never disclosed when he became a policeman! These kinds of matters it seems to me do have a bearing."

  Deputy District Attorney Brown told his superiors:

  "Maple believes Hettinger made an ego-enhancing statement to Dr. Thompson about a gun battle to impress Thompson, so it wouldn't jeopardize his pension chances. Even though Thompson had prior reports on Hettinger and knew all the facts. It's absolutely absurd, but the judge let him call Thompson as a witness."

  "Now, sir," Maple said to the doctor, "in the course of that particular interview, did Mr. Hettinger in substance and effect state to you that on March 10th, 1963, he began to develop an emotional problem and did he state that he was in a gun battle with two robbery suspects, and that he and his partner were fighting with the suspects when one of the suspects shot his partner and his partner died?"

  "Yes, so far as I know, he said something to that effect," said Dr. Thompson. "Perhaps not in those exact words."

  "Would you state in substance those were Mr. Hettinger's words, in substance rather than exact words?"

  "Yes. In substance. There may have been some alterations by the typist, but in general I would say that is what he said."

  "All right," said Sheldon Brown impatiently, when it was his turn. "When a girl is in with you typing an interview as it goes along, a good deal of discretion is left to her, clarifying what is told to her, is that correct?"

  "Yes."

  "A typist just types in substance, in effect paraphrasing what has been said. Is that correct?"

  "That's correct."

  "Is there any doubt in your mind," asked Maple on redirect examination, "that Mr. Hettinger, in answering the questions in your interview stated what we have referred to as the version recorded in your notes?"

  "Not in a general way," said the doctor, "but I do think some of the wording may be an interpretation of the typist."

  "If you felt the typist didn't accurately reflect what was being said, you would have asked her to correct it, is that not true?" asked Maple, now seeming impatient with the equivocation of his own witness.

  "I think not in this instance. I was really not concerned with the details of the shooting at all. Only the fact of it, you see?"

  "Dr. Thompson was one of the best known psychiatric witnesses in the county," Sheldon Brown said later. "We've faced him dozens of times. It was obvious he was going to hurt Maple's cause more than help it. Using Thompson like he did engendered great sympathy for Hettinger. Yet Maple seized on anything that might save Gregory Powell's life.

  "It was strange," Brown went on. "Maple's an ethical attorney, but he so completely identified with Gregory Powell that he was ignoring physical facts. The Dr. Thompson affair was a case in point. The whole ludicrous gun battle thing. It was obvious the doctor didn't know what the hell had been said on this issue and cared less. Maple said Thompson 'dragged' the story of that ordinary childhood pilfering out of Hettinger, and Maple implied that Hettinger was some kind of lifelong thief.

  "Christ, Hettinger had confessed to every one of the shrinks about this pitiable kid stuff. And in much greater detail. Maple just seemed to've rejected the other psychiatric reports as though to him they didn't exist. Thompson's report, he felt sure, proved Hettinger to be a lifelong thief and liar. I don't think even Gregory Powell bought his thesis. Nobody on the jury did, I'm sure.

  "Maple had been on the case too long. He was giving money to Powell, getting him clothes, acting as liaison, confessor, psychiatrist to Powell and his whole family. He was even trying unsuccessfully to get Powell and his girlfriend married, that poor black woman Powell had conned into helping him escape and who got herself in trouble for it. He just set logic aside as far as his client was concerned. The devastating Lindbergh statement, all of it. He said Hettinger and Smith were both lying about that. He believed in Gregory Powell implicitly. I don't think any defendant ever got a more faithful defense."

  Charles Maple had very pale blue eyes and almost no eyebrows. The church elder had a black dot on the iris of his right eye and a powerful voice which was as much at home before a congregation as a jury. He gestured with his hands when he talked, and when he frowned, his hairless brows made the pale blue eyes penetrate. Maple had the oratorical style of an evangelist, but the Harvard lawyer did not damn, he defended. He offered forgiveness and could extend his compassion to all men, all but the one whose testimony had to be a lie.

  The defender was positive beyond any doubt that Gregory P
owell was innocent of a calculated murder, that he stood to die in the gas chamber because of one man. Charles Maple had no charitable thoughts for that man, and his voice trembled prophetically when out of the jury's presence he discussed the star witness.

  "It's ironic," Maple said, "that Hettinger, like Powell, has been a sociopath all his life. He's been a thief since an early age. He reverted under stress to his preadolescent behavior. And he'll lie and manipulate to make himself look better, just like any guiltless sociopath. He said there was a girl secretary in Dr. Thompson's office and that she took the gun battle story from him. It's a boldfaced lie. Why did he lie? I don't know why he lied. I only know that he did.

  "Why did he steal? Because he might as well make it while he could. He'd been Chief Parker's chauffeur. His career was ruined because of innuendo. He stole because he felt it was owed him. He feels no guilt, not for stealing, not for being inadequate as a policeman during his confrontation with Powell and Smith. He's a true sociopath. The kleptomania thing was all an act. He doesn't know the meaning of guilt!"

  Gregory Powell had a much more fatalistic view of the witness:

  "In 1963 he was a shadow figure to me. Not quite real in many senses. In later years it was very odd, this man was about the most important figure in my life, and I knew hardly anything about him."

  Joshua Hill was one of the six men brought down from San Quentin Death Row by Gregory Powell to testify for him as a character witness. Hill was a young man who had shown a startling vocabulary when he was a baby, and despite his limited education, he had an adult I. Q. of 140. But Joshua Hill had not been toilet- trained until he was seven years old. He was known on the row as "Batman" because of a homemade cape he wore. When the Batman mood would strike, he often challenged one or several guards and had to be tear-gassed and subdued. It was said by Hill's mother that the Batman's father had beaten him up countless times during the boy's formative years to make him tough. If true, the father had done his job well. Joshua Hill was very tough.

  On two occasions Hill seriously assaulted other condemned men, fracturing the skull of the row's only Eskimo resident, and slashing the throat of another, though neither attack was fatal. Hill was darkly handsome, liked to pass for an Italian mafioso, and called himself Vito Giuseppe Cellini during his days on the street.

  It was a terrible disappointment to some of the other inmates in the county jail high power tank when jailers found a handcuff key in Joshua Hill's mouth. His Green Beret training and natural fierceness had induced some of them to bet that even without a gun he could escape a courtroom if unmanacled. Perhaps the gamblers were even more disappointed than Gregory Powell and Joshua Hill.

  In the spring, jail deputies had found Gregory Powell in possession of an Allen wrench which was used to try to remove steel screens from jail windows. Now, in the summer of 1969, after all escape plans had been thwarted one by one, it was a short-tempered Gregory Powell who was as usual being led from the courtroom to the jail elevator at day's end.

  He saw an old man, one of the railbirds who spend their days as spectators in criminal cases, prowling the corridors and courtrooms of the Hall of Justice, Hall of Records, and County Court House.

  This particular railbird was interested in Gregory Powell and came almost every day to see him. The railbird never spoke, he only grinned, and after a few weeks of this, Greg's head would spin on its swivel a dozen times each morning, glaring at the old man in the back of the courtroom. The railbird grinned like Death.

  Greg began to complain about the spectator but was told that the railbird was harmless and had a right to be here. Finally the old man began following Greg when the guards took him in chains from the courtroom to the jail elevators at day's end, and Greg started to listen for the shuffling footsteps behind him, and his head would swivel and he would peek between the deputies. The old man would be there. Grinning at him. Like Time. Like Death.

  One very hot summer day, deputies made a written report that prisoner Gregory U. Powell went berserk at the elevator landing and tried to attack a seventy year old male Caucasian for no apparent reason. The prisoner was restrained, but continued screaming and spitting at the man. The prisoner was led away, beside himself with rage the rest of the night. The next day the old man was in the courtroom. Grinning.

  "All of the confessions were inadmissible," Prosecutor Sheldon Brown said. "It was truly forgotten by now, even by counsel, what these defendants had once said in their confessions. Hettinger was a broken man, anyone could see that. Campbell was so forgotten he may as well never have lived."

  Sheldon Brown had been mildly amused at how Greg had played to the three blacks on the jury, telling in part how he had taught a black man to write. When the jury for Gregory Powell returned with a verdict of death in only six hours, one of the blacks told Brown that they only stayed out that long to make it look respectable.

  Still another escape attempt was planned. It was to take place in the day room of the new county jail. Several court prisoners were thought to be involved including another police killer, and ironically, an ex-Los Angeles policeman turned saloon owner, on trial for the insurance murder of his wife.

  Jimmy Smith was inexplicably transferred to the old county jail before the plotters were caught and the tools confiscated. They had been informed on. Jimmy was furious because his transfer made it look like he was the snitch. Jimmy decided it was an elderly inmate who went to the attorney room that night.

  It seemed that somebody always snitched him off. But it couldn't have been the old man. The bulls knew too much. No, it had to have been somebody close to him. Jimmy was put in the old Sirhan cell and forever separated from his partner. At least I won't be with Powell anymore, he thought. At least he'd be spared that. Something good had come of it after all.

  When Jimmy Smith had acquired a typewriter, Gregory Powell got a better one. In that Powell had testified under sodium amytal, Jimmy Smith also had to do it.

  The interview was not taped however, and was unspectacular, at times incoherent. There was one interesting moment. Jimmy's testimony was disjointed and self-contradictory, but during the crucial moment of describing the shooting, he said:

  "The body was jerkin and his right hand was jerkin. ... I'll never forget... I don't see the picture of Powell doin this. I don't see the picture of anybody doin this."

  Jimmy Smith during his interminable wait for a second trial kept a diary to allay his frayed nerves and ulcerated stomach. At times he wrote outraged declarations:

  Hundreds of days in court with more to come! Ten different judges have tried to stick their hooks in me, but I have managed to last. And for what, I don't know. But I will never cower before any master! Nor bend to any threat!

  At other times the defendant waxed poetic:

  Poor fool that I am. Never again will friendly eyes caress my eyes . . . nor love sweet lips kiss me. No hand grip mine in a display of mutual love. I, the grave, have claimed you Jimmy as my love. Farewell, Jimmy! I'm your everything!

  In the high power tank Jimmy Smith always got the gossip from the row. It was the same of course: the appeals, how the truly skillful jailhouse lawyers were doing with their own retrials, the sexual tidbits -who was doing it to whom-the new dudes who had arrived, the bad dudes to watch out for.

  One new one to watch out for was a skinny youth named Robles who had slashed a sleeping motorist and a hitchhiker in separate assaults to get himself into prison in the first place. Neither died, but while in the Santa Clara County Jail, Robles became involved in a bizarre escape scheme. He convinced his cellmate to pretend to hang himself with a bedsheet. Robles would hold his friend up and when the guard came in to cut him down, they would both overpower the bull. Unfortunately for the cellmate, Robles hanged his friend during the rehearsal. When guards came in to cut the dead man down they found Robles giggling and singing, "Hang down your head, Tom Dooley."

  Finally, in yet another prison murder, Robles fatally cut the throat of an inmate with a t
oothbrush/razor-blade weapon, at last guaranteeing himself a trip to the row.

  "Jumpin fuckin Jesus," said Jimmy Smith when he heard the story. "We got a couple here about as bad almost. One sucker jist don't care about nothin but jackin off and fightin the bulls. But that one you was talkin about reminds me of the guy that's down here now as a witness. Jesus," said Jimmy as he thought of the swarthy inmate who had carved lines in his own face beside the eyes and above the lips and rubbed in carbon black to make permanent cat's whiskers. He would occasionally come to jailers and say he was "getting the feeling" again. He warned that he wanted to kill and should be returned to the row. They were all in module 2500, the high power tank.

  "Looky here," said Jimmy Smith. "It ain't right, them lettin some crazy fuckin killers run loose like that, man."

  "Hell no," the other con agreed. "Ain't nobody gonna be safe. Somebody better get his shit together cause everybody's gonna have to be carrying blades all the time."

  "Jesus," said Jimmy Smith, thinking of going back there. No one cared on the row what your crime had been as long as you left the other cons alone and minded your own business. But dudes like this one murdered cons without reason!

  They both agreed. It just wasn't fair to the other condemned men. No one on Death Row would be safe as long as they had this killer among them.

  Attorney Charles Hollopeter at first characterized his client as paranoid. He seemed to Hollopeter more concerned with jail conditions than with saving his life. He would only talk to his lawyer on the subject of certain motions: for hotter food, for having certain jail lights extinguished, for having other lights left-on.

  Jimmy Smith had twice attacked Irving Kanarek, but now for some reason Jimmy seemed equally unhappy with Hollopeter. That made it unanimous. Jimmy thought every lawyer assigned him was incompetent or worse.

  Prosecutor Dino Fulgoni was a short, muscular, craggy man. A physical man, very different from the older dapper Pasadena lawyer with his curiously homespun delivery, who had a way of putting himself on trial and coming off sympathetically to juries. Fulgoni believed his opponent, Charles Hollopeter, was as good a trial man as there was in the Los Angeles area.