Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  “Oh, Ma,” he said. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  She wanted to believe the apparition.

  93

  Dawn Spens passed her days writing love letters to John Fry and sending them through the inmate mail as the couple waited in the county jail for trial. She scribbled away like a young teen with her first box of stationery. She dotted every letter “i” with big circles. She printed “I LOVE YOU” as though she was carving a sturdy oak. She enclosed “Dawn + John” in a heart of hearts.

  Right after the preliminary examination she wrote that she was trying to “be strong” and missed John after seeing him in court. She continued:

  “My love for you grows stronger with each passing day. I reminisce about days and nights passed. Right now it is about 6 A.M. I haven’t been sleeping very well. Isn’t that strange? My mind won’t slow down to let me sleep anymore.

  “Please don’t ever question my love for you. It’s as deep as the ocean, as wide as the sea, and as high as the mountains. I do know you love me and thank God for that every night.”

  A couple of days later she added:

  “… I can’t tell you how much I miss having your strong arms around me, supporting me. I can’t help but think about the days when all I’d have to do is ask and you would put your arms around me and hold me as long as I needed. You probably don’t know this, but when you would do that you were the only reason for me to continue living … You’re my whole life and you will continue to be my whole life, for as long as you wish. I hope that’s forever!!”

  There were at least thirty letters in all across the four-month wait. Fry was not nearly so prolific in his answers, often causing his girlfriend to dash off a flurry of writings in an attempt to get an answer. When he did, he often probed her sentiments on the pending murder case. He wrote her about her shortcomings in the interrogation by Gilbert Hill. He added that greater tests were ahead. Near mid-August, she wrote back:

  “… Babe, you know me better than anyone else could ever hope to. How did you know I felt that way about the deal with Hill? You never stop amazing me. I love you so deeply. My head was so fucked up that night, I honestly don’t remember what they told me to say or what I said. That isn’t any bullshit. I hate myself for it. Please believe I’ve never meant to hurt you, because I love you. Ya know you’re one hell of a good man!!!”

  Dawn hoped to get out of the county jail before the murder trial. Her attorney petitioned the court to have her bond reduced. She wrote Fry again, indicating she’d been in contact with her father, Roy:

  “My dad got into my ass on the phone. He said, ‘You think it was hard here before, it’s going to be five times harder this time. If you fuck up one time, I’m going to kick your ass out.’ Ain’t that a bitch!”

  “… If by another miracle I get out on bond, I’ll have to stay with him until this shit is over. I think that may be the best thing because I definitely plan on staying away from drugs. Dig. All drugs do is ruin people’s lives, and we definitely don’t need that. Right?”

  Dawn’s father, as well as her court appointed lawyer, Robert Slameka, repeatedly urged her to stop corresponding with her boyfriend. She sent him cigarettes as well as letters. Her bond was reduced to fifty thousand dollars, but her family decided not to bail her out. By September, Roy Spens no longer was sending for her inmate account.

  Dawn continued writing anyway, adding candy as well as cigarettes in her letters. She wrote that she regretted they had not married sooner, adding “as soon as possible I want us to get married and have a baby.”

  Not all their communication would be on jail stationery. Dawn and John were housed in an outdated lockup built in the Purple Gang era. For years the old county jail has served inmates with what they affectionately call “the phone,” a system of heating vents that ran through the walls. Prisoners have used the air ducts to talk from floor to floor. John was in ward 511, while Dawn was in 612, almost directly above. The couple sent messages through other inmates and sometimes talked directly.

  On September 9, John made an attempt to avoid his trial altogether. Working through a female contact he’d made on the vent, he reportedly bribed an unscrupulous guard to smuggle a pistol and a couple of hacksaw blades into his cell. That Monday, John and two other inmates forced two jail guards into a cell and stripped them of their uniforms.

  John waited on a fifth-floor catwalk as his cohorts put on the uniforms and tried to find a way out. One inmate got as far as a stairwell between the first and second floors, where he held sheriff’s deputies and Detroit police at bay for nearly four hours before surrendering. All three were charged with escape.

  On the first day of October, Dawn Spens went to court in an effort to get her homicide confession back. Her attorney wanted the statement declared inadmissible in the upcoming trial. Dawn took the stand and claimed she’d requested a lawyer after her arrest but was denied. She also maintained she’d been promised she could go home if she made a statement.

  Recorder’s Court Judge Michael F. Sapala, who would also hear her full trial, denied the motion, saying he found Dawn Spens “totally lacking in credibility.” Later, Dawn asked Sapala to assign her a new attorney, saying she and Slameka couldn’t get along.

  The hearing also initiated a lover’s spat. John wondered if she had incriminated him. He wrote Dawn to say her charges were insignificant, “a bullshit meatball case,” compared to the life sentence he faced.

  Four days after the hearing she wrote back:

  “I’ll tell you what ‘the fuck’ my problem is: The real truth is that I’m pissed at you for getting me into this. No I shouldn’t, be in your shoes, because it was your decision, or don’t you remember? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming you, I just don’t feel you have the right to put me down. I’m trying to be strong, but it is hard for me right now, even though I’m only facing fifteen years.”

  Later in the letter she added: “I don’t want this fucking place to break us up. Do you feel the same way, or do you even care?”

  And, “I do love you, honey. Don’t let this situation make you forget that.”

  The two began arguing over other matters, in their letters and over the vent. Dawn was upset over jailhouse rumors that her boyfriend had fallen for another girl, one of his “rap partners” on the phone. John criticized her for talking with other male inmates through the heating system. Dawn’s letters began dropping off. In late October she wrote one of the last letters he would receive before the trial:

  “This place is really getting to me. I don’t know what I’m going to do in prison. I guess I’ll live. I have to. I don’t know why, but I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately …

  “I can see your feelings for me are changing already. You don’t trust me anymore (if you ever did) and every time I talk to you, we argue. We never used to argue before. I don’t know why all this shit is running through my head. I really don’t know much of anything anymore.

  “I do love you. I know I always will, even if we’re forced to be separated for a long time. Please don’t play with my feelings or me. I miss you so much it hurts. I hurt every night when I lay down to go to sleep, and I know you won’t be there to hold me. You wouldn’t believe how much I miss you holding me. I need you so badly. I hope some day we’ll be able to embrace again. I know one day we will, but it just seems so far off right now …”

  94

  They portrayed me to the jury as this Cass Corridor street pimp junkie that’s doin’ these evil things and using young girls—and now he’s done fucked up and killed somebody.

  —JOHN CARL FRY,

  March 1987

  The trial of John Carl Fry began in December under the threat of another killing. Sheriff’s deputies sent word over to Judge Michael F. Sapala that the vents at the county jail were blowing with rumors that Fry would be executed in open court.

  Fry reportedly had information about other murders, the deputies said. Jail talk had it that if testimony didn’t go his w
ay, he would plea-bargain to a lighter charge in exchange for incriminating information. Sapala had the capacity courtroom audience searched one by one with hand-held metal detectors.

  That meant at least two searches for the capacity audience. Visitors already had to negotiate an airport metal detector at the front door of the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice. People had pulled guns before in Recorder’s Court, including one pistol-packing judge, who later was disbarred for other judicial indiscretions.

  The twenty-three judges on the Recorder’s bench disposed of more felonies in one day than most Michigan counties handled in a year. Despite the caseload, Recorder’s showed few signs of wear. Its courtrooms were smartly appointed with soft lighting and polished wood. Sapala’s was in the shape of a trapezium, like a half theater-in-the-round.

  One of the bench’s most respected jurists, Sapala would oversee legal talent that was quite familiar with the kind of trench warfare fought in one of the most active criminal courts in the country.

  Robert Agacinski was in his tenth year as a trial prosecutor, the Canty case his third highly publicized murder of the year. The wiry, bespectacled prosecutor looked less like the stalwart of the people and more like a family dentist. He often tried cases like one as well. Agacinski possessed the disarming talent of comforting witnesses with an almost sighing delivery. Just about the time a tough customer dismissed his experience in the chair as uneventful, Agacinski began drilling through a nerve.

  Jay Nolan, Fry’s attorney, had emerged over two decades as one of Recorder’s most colorful practitioners. A former assistant prosecutor, Nolan possessed a wit matched only by his fondness for suspenders and dapper boaters. He bore a striking resemblance to Clarence Darrow, but his humor was entirely his own. Probably his most famous one-liner came when he showed up very late for a well-reported trial some years back. Nolan strolled into the packed courtroom, tossed his straw hat onto a hall tree, turned to the annoyed defense team, and said:

  “Well, ladies and gentlemen, let the perjury begin.”

  Nolan, however, found nothing funny about John Fry’s unshakable request to be tried by a jury. Nolan feared that with a panel of twelve the details of the mutilation would overshadow his argument for manslaughter. He planned on arguing that Fry had killed Alan Canty in a rage rather than cold blood. Nolan had urged his client to put his life in the hands of Sapala, as Dawn Spens would by requesting a bench trial. Not that the forty-three-yearold judge wasn’t streetwise after seven years on the bench. But Nolan knew that Sapala, like most Recorder’s judges, was reluctant to dispense a first-degree murder verdict and its mandatory life sentence unless the element of premeditation was rock solid.

  But Lucky Fry wanted a jury, and he got one on December 3—a panel of twelve women, with two female alternates. Nolan preferred it that way. He was hoping for some sympathy for Fry because the murder victim had been playing around on his wife.

  The first full day of testimony was December 4. Sapala announced the jury would hear all testimony concerning Fry, then be excused when witnesses were questioned about the role of Dawn Spens. Her trial would run concurrently with her old boyfriend’s. Her defense would not begin until after Fry’s verdict.

  In the courtroom Fry might have passed for an assistant professor, as long as he didn’t roll up his sleeves. He wore a brown tweed suit and a green tie, loaners from an acquaintance of Nolan’s. His grayish blond hair had grown to the bottom of his collar. His beard was neatly trimmed, and he was decked with a walrus’s mustache that concealed his lip. Two attorneys sat between Fry and his girlfriend at the defense table. The defendant’s eyes rarely met during the entire trial.

  It took two days for sixteen of Fry’s friends, relatives, and street associates to tell what they saw and heard. Agacinski avoided exact dates or days of the week. Many time-frame discrepancies existed between police statements, preliminary exam testimony, and other accounts.

  But the central story remained consistent. Frank McMasters and Cheryl Krizanovic told what they knew of Al, about Cheryl’s repeated trips from Detroit to the north, and about John and Dawn’s arrival with the body parts in mid-July. Dot Wilson told of Fry’s late-night calls. The people of the Morrell Apartments repeated Fry’s one-liners the day he burned the car. Neighbor Michael Oliver told what he heard Fry say at the picnic table. John Bumstead testified about the conversation on the trip to New York.

  As they testified, many avoided the discerning eyes of the defendant. Fry hardly moved from an upright, but relaxed, posture. Occasionally testimony would prompt a slight smirk at the corner of the mustache. Then his eyes rolled deep into his head.

  Many aspects of the full story never made the court record. The trial revealed little about Alan Canty. Jan Canty not only wasn’t a witness, she didn’t attend the trial. She was at an international symposium of psychotherapists in Arizona. Attorneys agreed to stipulate her testimony from the preliminary exam.

  One bemused member of the audience was neighbor Juanita Deckoff, who also wasn’t called as a witness. She’d returned from her vacation after the investigation was completed. The early testimony confused her.

  “I couldn’t figure out who this Dr. Miller was everybody was talking about,” she said later. “Then I realized they were talking about Al Canty. I only knew him by that name.”

  The continuing contention by Fry and Spens that they knew the psychologist only as Dr. Al Miller would go unchallenged through the entire trial. Evidence from the Casper bungalow—the sheet of paper with Al’s real name—never reached the prosecutor’s office. Neither did the note suggesting Dawn set Al up for “goodbye.”

  Agacinski called a nervous Tammy Becker, who testified about the conversation in her car and the couple’s plans to move to California “to straighten out their lives.” She told how the couple expected “ten to thirty thousand dollars” on the weekend of the murder. She relayed Fry’s statement that his deal had “backfired.”

  But a hole widened in the narrative as attorneys battled over the more bloody aspects of the case. The prosecution argued that Fry had planned to extort a large sum of money from Dr. Al Miller. That assumption left a big question that begged to be asked: How does someone blackmail a man whose identity is a fabrication?

  The question never was posed.

  As Agacinski presented his case, Jay Nolan found himself in a unique position for a defense attorney. He had to convince a jury that his client was a liar, and for that reason he should be exonerated from murder one. Fry’s bragging that he was going to “kill The Doc,” Nolan argued, was nothing more than puffing.

  But Gary Neil had the smoking gun. He was the last witness on a Thursday afternoon, the third day of the trial. Neil took the stand in another one of his long-sleeve sweatshirts. His voice was low and slow. His testimony was more graphic than in the preliminary exam. Neil described his relationship with Fry:

  “Well, I met him in the penitentiary. I didn’t know him that well there … On the street I ran into him again about a year ago and became more or less drug-related buddies. We both like coke.”

  Neil testified how John and Dawn had a plethora of names for Al Canty—“a chump,” “the sugar daddy,” “a lame.” Then he testified about the basement conversation in the days before the killing.

  “Then he asked me if I knew how to get rid of a body after it happened, how to get rid of the bones and everything completely. I said, ‘I don’t know, John.’ That was about it.”

  “How long did the conversation last?” Agacinski asked.

  “It lasted about twenty minutes. He was showing me the layout of the basement and the plastic and ‘put the body on here’ and take it apart and so forth.”

  Jay Nolan sprung out of his chair for the crossexamination. He carried in his hand four printed statements Neil gave to police on four separate occasions. The first two contained no reference to the basement conversation. Nolan boomed his first question.

  “It was after this that they had locked you up and
told you that you would stay until you told the truth that you gave this version about the basement conversation, is that right?”

  “That and after the visit from my sister, who told me I better tell the truth, no use holding back information on this guy.”

  “This visit from your sister was when you were in the jailhouse locked up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So the time you decided to implicate him with this story you were in the jailhouse?”

  “Right.”

  “Now, you are in the jailhouse and you now remember things, right?”

  Agacinski objected. Sustained.

  Nolan extracted Neil’s criminal record, then went back to the four statements. He tried to impeach him with a discussion of the exact date of the basement conversation with Fry, using the varying reports he gave homicide detectives.

  “Now, in this statement you are fixing this conversation as five days before the homicide?”

  “I said about a week before, eight days before that he would kill the doctor. That’s what I told them.”

  “Here it says five days before,” said Nolan, pointing to one of the statements.

  “I said a week or eight days before.”

  “I am asking, your statement was five days before?”

  “One says five and one says eight.”

  “This one says five days before?” Nolan asked, pointing again.

  “Yes.”

  “There was another time you said eight days before?”

  “Right. I didn’t keep up on the days.”

  Neil soon had most everyone in the courtroom as confused as his own confused memory. Nolan was losing his witness, and nothing would rattle Neil’s relaxed demeanor. Several friends later said Neil was stoned, but he stuck to the mutilation story.

  By then it was late afternoon. Judge Sapala recessed the trial until the following Monday. Nolan’s crossexamination was scheduled to begin with Neil on Monday morning, but Neil didn’t show up. Sapala ordered more witnesses brought forth.