Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  Sapala himself was a tougher judge than when he first took the Recorder’s bench seven years ago. The unrelenting parade of repeat offenders had changed many of his early beliefs about criminal rehabilitation. But Sapala, the only lawyer in a family of physicians, still was capable of mercy when he saw a lawbreaker he felt needed healing.

  From the first day of the trial there was no sign of the stoned hooker who had shown up at the preliminary exam four and a half months ago. Dawn Spens had gained twenty pounds in the county jail. She was escorted into court wearing a clinging purple knit dress that accented her lumps and rolls. Her calves were swollen by the starchy jail food. Her permanent had grown out, replaced by strings of hair that was now ash brown and pulled back from her head. She wore a little black bow on top, as though she was trying to reclaim youthful innocence. But with the dress, the jail-white skin, and the circular scars showing through her nylons, the total effect was one of pathos.

  The role Dawn would play out in the courtroom was one the prostitute knew well, one she had played with her high school chums, her Johns, the doctors at Receiving Hospital, and psychologist Alan Canty.

  Ziolkowski had already laid out his defense in an opening statement the week before.

  “I think the facts in this case will show that prior to coming in contact with Mr. Fry, Dawn Spens led a rather ordinary life,” he told the court.

  His defense was twofold. First he sought to prove that Dawn Spens was not subject to the mutilation statute. True, he argued, she had “carried away” the valise with Al Canty’s body parts from the refrigerator, but she’d had no idea what was inside.

  Second, Ziolkowski would argue that Dawn was not an accessory after the fact to murder because she had acted under duress. She destroyed evidence, raised money for their flight, and sought to cover up the crime under orders from her pimp.

  Dawn Spens followed those orders, he would argue, because she was terrified of Lucky Fry.

  As Fry’s jury filed in and out on previous days, Agacinski had little difficulty establishing Dawn’s role as an accessory. The concealment of body parts. The cleanup of blood. Driving to northern Michigan. Destruction of Canty’s documents. Buying gas for the car-burning. Raising money for their flight. All these elements easily were established by Frank McMasters, Cheryl Krizanovic, and Dawn’s own statement to police. Other witnesses told of her sobbing outside the Morrell Apartments.

  With little fanfare, Ziolkowski rose from his seat, lumbered a few feet into midcourt, and crossexamined some southsiders, opening holes he’d later fill with his defense.

  “Did you ever see John beat Dawn?” he asked Tammy Becker.

  “Not literally beat her, no … I seen him slap her a few times,” Tammy said.

  “You don’t consider that beating somebody?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “… And do you recall having told the police that Dawn would be afraid to leave?”

  “I felt she was afraid to leave.”

  “What gave you that impression?”

  “The way she acted.”

  “What about her actions that led you to believe she was afraid to leave Mr. Fry?”

  “Because he was so demanding with her.”

  Ziolkowski crossexamined Cheryl Krizanovic, probing her violent relationship with her old boyfriend. Cheryl told the court how John introduced her to drugs and prostitution, about the many beatings and the time he shattered her spleen. She explained his threats to kill her if she ever left.

  “Did you ever discuss that with Dawn Spens?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you discuss the fact that Mr. Fry had struck you on numerous occasions?”

  “Yes.”

  “Had Dawn Spens—did she ever tell you about being struck by Mr. Fry?”

  “On one occasion.”

  “Did you ever see her being struck by Mr. Fry?”

  “No.”

  Ziolkowski questioned John Bumstead early in the trial on the argument at his house when Dawn’s nose was broken.

  Bumstead said the argument was among the four of them—himself, his wife, and John and Dawn. Under redirect examination Agacinski tried to put the group’s lifestyle in context.

  “He was hollering at Dawn Spens the way you holler at your wife?” Agacinski asked.

  “I don’t know. I holler at my wife very hard. I don’t know how to compare him with me.”

  “… After blood is coming from Dawn Spens’s nose, what happened?”

  “She got up and she said, ‘My nose is bleeding.’ ”

  “Then what happened?”

  “They left.”

  “… Do you hit your wife?”

  “I used to, and I am not proud of it, but it happens.”

  “Did blood come from her nose too?”

  “I don’t know. You have to ask her that.”

  As for Dawn’s knowledge of the contents of the valise and the plastic bag hurled out off I-75, neither Cheryl, Frank, nor any other witness testified that they had heard Dawn say she knew what was inside.

  On Thursday morning, the day after Fry’s verdict, Agacinski added the final installment of the people’s case by calling Marlyss Landeros to testify about Dawn’s confession. She read the entire document into the record.

  In her statement Dawn reported: “John told me to go to the kitchen and take the overnight suitcase with the body parts of Al in it out of the freezer.”

  And as for the garbage bag Fry dumped on I-75: “Nobody told me but I knew he was throwing away body parts of Al.”

  John Fry was locked up in the county jail cell when Dawn took the stand later that morning. Wearing the same dress she’d worn for six days of the trial, she raised her hand, was sworn, then sat, crossing her legs. Her scars were visible from the last row of the courtroom.

  Dawn’s audience was a dozen onlookers, the court staff, the attorneys, and, most importantly, Judge Michael F. Sapala. Roy Spens sat on a bench near a wall, his eyes focused on the floor, his head in his hands.

  “Miss Spens, tell us your full name, please,” Ziolkowski began.

  “Dawn Marie Spens.”

  Ziolkowski moved to the center of the courtroom. The big attorney walked slowly back and forth as he continued with his questions.

  “And how old are you, ma’am?”

  “Twenty.”

  Her voice was soft, her brown eyes attentive.

  It was a moving narrative of human bondage—but quite unlike the one that would be told outside the courtroom later by Dolores Cusmano, Donald Scott Carlton, Juanita Deckoff, Sue Stennett, Mark Bando, Cheryl Krizanovic, Frank McMasters, Dr. Lorraine Awes, John Carl Fry, and thirty of Dawn’s own jailhouse letters written before and after the trial.

  According to her testimony she’d left high school and Harper Woods to move in with Donald Carlton in the Cass Corridor. There she took a job working in a party store. Don beat her often. One day, John Fry showed up on the scene. He threatened Carlton, delivering Dawn from his beatings. She moved in with John. But then Fry introduced her to intravenous drugs. Before that she had only smoked some marijuana and drank. Fry introduced her to prostitution, she said. Yes, she’d heard about Cheryl’s ruptured spleen, and she was afraid to leave John. She told of the time he broke her nose and other times he slapped her. She said she feared he would kill her or her family if she left him. She said she had no place to go if she left.

  “Did you love John Fry?” Ziolkowski asked, pushing his glasses higher on his nose and looking into her eyes.

  “At one time I cared about him. I thought I owed him something at the beginning because he had gotten that one guy away from me.”

  “And did there come a time when your feelings changed?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how did it change, what were your feelings then about John Fry?”

  “I resented him.”

  “But you stayed with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I did
n’t feel I had any other choice.”

  Then Ziolkowski moved into the circumstances surrounding the murder. John and Al began arguing while she was vomiting, she said. She really didn’t know what they were arguing about. After the killing Fry ordered her to listen for a heartbeat. Then he ordered her to turn tricks. The body disappeared while she was gone.

  “Why didn’t you go to the police at that time?”

  “I was afraid of John, and I knew that—Well, he had told me before that he had escaped from jail. I knew if I went to the police he would get me.”

  Dawn testified she didn’t know what happened to the body until she made her statement to Marlyss Landeros in Homicide. She only “suspected” Al’s body part was being thrown out on I-75. She did not know what was in the valise. She offered an explanation for her statement to Landeros about the brown bag.

  “Did you tell Officer Landeros that you took the bag with the body parts in it from the refrigerator?”

  “I explained it to them what the bag looked like, and they told me that was the bag with the body parts in it. So then, from that point on, whenever I referred to it, she put ‘the bag with the body parts’ rather than going into the explanation that [it was] just the bag I had seen.”

  “She characterized the bag you described as ‘the bag with the body parts in it’?”

  “Yes.”

  “… Was that your language?”

  “No.”

  A taped confession would have settled the dispute. But there had never been time for tape recorders and transcripts in a homicide section handling six hundred murders a year.

  Ziolkowski concluded her testimony with Dawn saying she’d received threatening letters from Fry in jail.

  “He told me that if I didn’t—In the letters he wrote, he said if I didn’t let him know something by December 3, he would assume that I was on the other side and act accordingly when he saw me; that there was either time to ‘be right or be gone.’ ”

  At Agacinski’s request, the court ordered he be allowed to see the letters, but neither side entered them into the record.

  After lunch, Agacinski got out his drill. He led Dawn Spens again through her account of her early days with John Fry.

  “So after a month or two of being with Mr. Fry your feelings of love or affection went away?”

  The prosecutor stood in the middle of the courtroom, seemingly bewildered.

  “Yes,” Dawn said calmly.

  “… But because [of] what he would do on the streets, did you feel some affection or some respect or some debt that you owed John Fry as well?”

  “It wasn’t really—I can’t explain it very well. In some respects I guess I did feel indebted to him.”

  The prosecutor ground at the defendant’s story for an hour. Then Agacinski cited Tammy Becker’s testimony about their plans to go to California.

  Dawn denied there were any such firm plans at all. She portrayed the day of the killing as another routine visit by Dr. Al Miller.

  He tried to impeach her testimony about being ordered to clean the bathtub.

  “Did John come in and criticize your cleanup job at the time?”

  “No.”

  “You were afraid he was going to come in and criticize your cleanup job?”

  “I just did what he told me to do.”

  “You were just being thorough.”

  Agacinski paused and smiled, then quickly switched to her story about the brown valise.

  “Then after you cleaned up the bathroom, you got this overnight case. How did it feel? Tell us how it felt in your hand.”

  “I grabbed it by the handle.”

  “How heavy was it?”

  “Fairly heavy.”

  “… How long had that overnight case been in your house?”

  “Ever since we moved there.”

  “How long had it been in the freezer?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did it look out of place to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Had you ever seen that in the freezer before?”

  “No.”

  “But you didn’t want to think what was in it?”

  “No.”

  Agacinski pled, gestured, and paced, but Dawn responded in short, soft answers. Sometimes she knitted her brow slightly, looking as perplexed as her interrogator. He prompted her to admit she was never physically threatened when she aided Fry after the crime. But he never found a nerve.

  On redirect, Robert Ziolkowski asked one more question.

  “Miss Spens, I noticed some marks on the back of your legs. Can you tell me what those are?”

  “Scars from using drugs,” she said.

  Dawn Spens’s trial was adjourned until the following Monday. The Sunday night before what would be the last day of testimony, Dawn penned another letter to John:

  “I truly hope this letter finds you doing as well as can be expected. You wouldn’t believe how shocked I was when I heard the verdict. Tomorrow is supposed to be my last day of trial … My nerves are shattered. It really pisses me off that it is taking so long to finish this trial …

  “Everyone up here was bummed out when they heard the verdict on you. My mom and my sister cried. There are a couple of girls up here who wanted me to tell you that they admire your style.”

  When the trial resumed after the lunch hour Monday, Ziolkowski introduced Michael Abramsky, a clinical psychologist versed in drug and spouse abuse. Abramsky had conducted a clinical workup on Dawn Spens, based on a twohour interview with her in the jail in early November.

  Abramsky remarked that during their interview Spens’s “emotions were flat.”

  “She did not show a normal range of emotions,” he said. “There was little spontaneity. There were very little emotions of any kind.”

  Abramsky said it could be a product of longtime drug abuse or her “lifelong habitual behavior,” but he couldn’t tell which one. He characterized Dawn as a person who was dependent on others, who made no decisions of her own.

  “Is that thought process or lack of a thought process consistent with one who is drug dependent?” Ziolkowski asked.

  “It is also consistent with someone who has certain historical factors that Miss Spens shares. She comes from a broken home. There was a lot of substance abuse in the family. There was very little guidance …”

  He compared her with an abused spouse, saying she suffered from the kind of passive behavior associated with the syndrome. Given her makeup, Abramsky said she was acting under duress after the murder.

  Attorneys made their closing arguments after a short afternoon recess. Agacinski tried to evoke what might have prompted Al Canty to visit the bungalow on Casper on July 13.

  “Two things concern me about her relation—her talking about the facts in this case,” he told the court. “The first is her contradicting Tammy Becker [on] going to California. Miss Becker was clear in testifying that the week before the death of Dr. Canty, Miss Spens herself mentioned that the coming weekend was [when they were] to go to California …

  “It is my argument that Miss Spens was much more involved in the perpetration of some financial fraud from Dr. Canty, that she was an active participant in getting a large sum of money to finance [her flight] to flee with John Fry to California. She had no care for the consequences of Dr. Canty, whether he would survive or not …”

  He also pointed out her 3.8 grade point average in high school but questioned her “candor” in her testimony. After taking the court again through the testimony, Agacinski, a prosecutor not normally prone to metaphor, closed by creating one for Judge Michael F. Sapala:

  “I believe Miss Spens is accountable as to both counts, and I ask the court not to be seduced by Miss Spens as Dr. Canty was, and to find her guilty on both counts.”

  Ziolkowski opened by saying he found the prosecutor’s comment about seduction “interesting.” There was some spring in his step as he added, “From all the evidence and testimony I heard, Dr. Canty
seemed to be the one that initiated this whole process.”

  The big attorney then stood motionless in front of Judge Sapala and matterof-factly painted Dawn Spens as helpless.

  “I believe,” he said in closing, “what we have heard from Dawn Spens from the witness stand is the case, and that is that she is the true victim of this case. We feel some compassion for Dr. Canty but no compassion for Mr. Fry, but I think the true victim, the person both these individuals were feeding off of, if you will excuse the expression, was Dawn Spens …”

  Twenty-four hours later on December 17, the parties gathered again for Judge Sapala’s verdict. But first, he expressed the frustrations that awaited anyone who was prone to investigate the case of W. Alan Canty.

  “We,” Sapala said, “are left to determine the fact of this shameful and disgusting episode via an odd and bizarre parade of dope addicts, prostitutes, thieves, and admitted lawbreakers. Such never makes the job of a fact finder easy …

  “The core of this strange universe is narcotics. We have been exposed to a hedonistic and cruel world where the pursuit of powdery substances shapes and molds every relationship of thought, every desire, and ultimately compels an end of pain and misery and death.

  “Whether it was Dawn Spens or John Fry or Gary Neil or McMasters or Krizanovic or Becker or Bumstead or … W. Alan Canty, Ph.D., we see only self-gratification of individual appetites.

  “The people I have seen live in a community where there is absolutely no love. They are only users of dope and users of each other.”

  Judge Sapala found Dawn Marie Spens guilty of being an accessory to murder after the fact, but not guilty on the charge of mutilation of a dead body.

  Then he referred her to the Recorder’s Court Psychiatric Clinic for evaluation.

  “Miss Spens, I know you talked to Dr. Abramsky, but it won’t hurt that you talk to one of the psychologists or psychiatrists here at the clinic. It may help in terms of the ultimate sentence in this case.”