Never Let Them See You Cry

by Edna Buchanan

  Harold Russell was asleep at his daughter’s Cape Cod home when the telephone rang at 1:18 A.M. His son, on his way to surgery, said, “I’ve been shot.” Before boarding the next flight to Miami, his father and sister learned the shooting involved a man named Anderson.

  During the flight it occurred to the father that Anderson was the name of the woman he had met at Thanksgiving. “It’s so insane and unbelievable,” he said later. “So many crazy things are happening. I hate guns. I’ve always hated guns.”

  Lance’s mother was bitter. “When I heard those three terrible words, ‘Lance is dead,’ I could not accept it,” Erika Anderson said. “It is too horrible. I would have preferred that Lance be killed in a plane crash.”

  Homicide detectives with a search warrant took 78 spent cartridges, more than ISO rounds of ammunition, scissors, fibers, thread, two rolls of duct tape and photographs from Jerry Russell’s home. They also found papers in a white envelope marked KATHI and a Valentine’s Day card.

  Russell, shackled to a hospital bed, was charged with first-degree murder.

  Lawyers estimated the net worth of Lance’s estate at $1 million. He was insured for more than $200,000. His widow was the beneficiary.

  Kathi hired a lawyer and declined to take a polygraph test. “She is not a suspect in anything,” her lawyer explained.

  Prosecutor Roy Kahn agreed. “The poor woman,” he said, “has suffered enough.”

  Kathi later changed her mind and, without telling police, submitted to a private polygraph test. “She felt there were certain implications and innuendos,” her lawyer said. “She passed with flying colors.” He did not know the precise questions, but said, “Whatever you think is relevant, she passed.”

  The top-flight Miami criminal defense attorney hired by Russell’s father was not impressed. “I’ve seen people pass polygraph examinations they should have flunked,” said Joel Hirschhorn, “and I’ve seen other people fail tests they should have passed. The results are not acceptable in court because too much depends on nonscientific matters.” He questioned whether the state’s initial investigation was “as thorough as it should have been.”

  But prosecutor Kahn pronounced the case solved.

  Executrix of Lance’s estate, Kathi collected his $201,485 life insurance and sued her former sweetheart for shooting her spouse. She asked for damages, citing funeral expenses, mental anguish and the loss of Lance’s support.

  Jerry Russell’s ex-wife sued also, asking to have his assets frozen to assure her $600-a-month child support. Eastern fired him for shooting a “fellow pilot” and creating “unfavorable publicity” that reflected on the airline’s reputation.

  Russell disputed his dismissal, on grounds that his “alleged misconduct” occurred “off duty” and not on Eastern property. Kathi, president of a flight attendants’ organization, was not fired.

  Eastern officials remained tight-lipped. “We never comment on the personal lives of employees,” a spokesman said. Russell added to the airline’s grief by pleading insanity. Pilot of a jumbo jet just three days before ambushing Lance Anderson, Russell’s defense was that he was such a severe alcoholic that his brain was addled. Hirschhorn said his client had been drinking and could not remember why he was outside the Anderson home that night. He said Russell was hopelessly addicted to both alcohol and Kathi, who had shared a carafe of wine with him at lunch on the day of the crime.

  One of Russell’s friends, top aide to an assistant Miami police chief, had tried to talk Russell out of his dead-end romance with a married woman. Russell refused to listen. “He was absolutely infatuated, enthralled,” Donald Warshaw said. “It reached the point at which I think he was somewhat embarrassed about the fact. He would lie to his friends and say he was staying home—when he was really seeing her.”

  “I think most people who have been in love understand the power of that emotion,” attorney Hirschhorn said. “It all really goes back to when Eve offered Adam that first apple.”

  The dead man’s mother stopped speaking to her daughter-in-law, who had refused to pay the $5,418 owed for Lance’s funeral. The mother wrote to then-Eastern chairman Frank Borman: “Your employees are liable for our losing Lance. He left your employ unwillingly, as he left his life.”

  Borman did not reply.

  To Dade State Attorney Janet Reno, she wrote: “My fine young eagle should still be flying.”

  Reno did not reply.

  Erika Anderson wanted a first-degree murder conviction and the death penalty—nothing less. “Can Lance be allowed to be second-degree dead? Like only on weekends?” she asked. “He is one hundred percent dead.”

  The week-long trial on the fourth floor of the Justice Building played like a hit show to a packed house. A sign outside the courtroom announced NO SEATS AVAILABLE. Crowds waited to be first in line after luncheon recesses.

  Circuit Judge Joseph R Farina, a boyish workaholic, urged jurors to bring sweaters because of the building’s runaway air conditioner, to stand and stretch often, called them “folks” and worked them hard. Marched off to a nearby hospital cafeteria for suppers, they labored through ten-, twelve- and thirteen-hour days.

  Prosecutor Kahn waived the death penalty. Defense attorney Hirschhorn, almost breaking into song, warned prospective jurors that the case dealt with “hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate.” Anyone involved in a love triangle, he said, might find the testimony “too uncomfortable.” He suggested they speak up before being chosen.

  Nobody did.

  Russell, pale and thin, listened intently, occasionally jotting in red ink on a yellow legal pad. His sister, stepmother, sixteen-year-old daughter Wendy, and his father were all present in court. The elder Russell, heartsick, said that the murder pained him more than the loss of his hands in World War II.

  “As one who has been flying for forty years,” he questioned, “just how much psychiatric testing is done by the airlines to ensure that the men who fly these planes carrying millions of passengers have the mental and physical capacity to do so?”

  The grim parents and brother of Lance Anderson were also present. The mother, a stately blonde, wore black every day.

  “Was this murder one of premeditation, first-degree murder?” asked prosecutor Kahn. He said it was, that Russell was neither crazy nor alcoholic, but was cold-blooded. “This man was prepared to kill. He had the intent.”

  Hirschhorn said that Kathi Anderson, a “woman loved by two dashing airline pilots, wanted the best of two worlds. She had a husband who was a superlative provider and a lover who could satisfy her sexual needs.” While her husband bought her a new Mercedes and planned their future, she continued seeing Russell, who wanted to marry her. “Like a carrot before a rabbit, she dangled her personality and her body before Jerry Russell.”

  Driven mad by jealousy and frustration and manipulated by the woman he loved, his client, he said, arrived at the murder scene drunk, pedaling a bicycle and toting a bulky air-conditioning duct that police identified as a crude silencer.

  Kathi testified for the prosecution. Wearing a modest highnecked white blouse, her blond hair in a prim Dutch-boy cut, she admitted lying to police and to the prosecutor. In earlier statements she had told them she met Russell in 1979. During questions from Hirschhorn she conceded that she had comforted her lover the day his mother died—in 1978. Both were married when they met. Earlier she said she began the affair with Russell while she and her husband were apart and ended it when they reconciled. Now she acknowledged that their intimacy began long before the separation and continued afterward.

  “Why didn’t you terminate your relationship with Russell when your husband moved back into the house?” Hirschhorn asked.

  “I didn’t want to,” the widow coolly replied. Unruffled after grueling hours of cross-examination, she gazed dry-eyed at her former lover, who stared back.

  Russell was the friend her husband was not, she said, but lacked ambition. She had no id
ea, she said, that he would kill Lance.

  “You saw nothing wrong in living with your husband and having Valentine’s Day dinner with Russell?” asked Hirschhorn.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  She admitted dining with him at nearly twenty fine restaurants and accompanying him on trips to Boston, Cape Cod and Toronto. Her daughter, Lisa, she said, “liked Jerry very much, he made her mother happy, and she had seen her mother unhappy.”

  She was neglected, she said. Lance was “never home,” because of business. She added that she saw nothing unusual about Russell’s drinking habits, although he once crawled into the backseat of a car and fell asleep after they left a restaurant.

  Hirschhorn asked about Russell’s former wife, Judy, who had called Kathi before the divorce, pleading to save her marriage.

  He asked Kathi if she felt the slightest “moral concern for that woman’s feelings about her marriage.” Kathi asked him to repeat the question. Twice she said she did not understand it.

  That, the lawyer said, was his answer.

  Kathi did once consult a lawyer about her rights if she divorced Lance, she said. “I was concerned about what would legally be mine.”

  “You are now suing Mr. Russell for every penny he has?” Hirschhorn asked.

  “Correct,” the widow said crisply.

  Gerald Russell took the stand in his own defense.

  “Did you shoot Lance Anderson?” Hirschhorn asked.

  Struggling to speak, Russell began to weep. “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Why did you shoot him?”

  “I don’t know,” Russell said, shoulders shaking as he began to sob.

  “How do you feel about Kathi Anderson today?”

  “In my head, I feel like I was used,” he said, tears streaming. “But when I saw her the other day, my heart said I still feel the same way. I had some very, very strong feelings when she walked in here.”

  The eyes of five female jurors were swimming. One, a divorcee, wiped away tears.

  The day Kathi testified against Russell was the first time he had seen her since the day of the murder. She had come to his home the morning of the murder, he said, and they had made love.

  He went to her home that night and made her a widow.

  It all began when he invited her for a drink, he said. He was nervous. “I had never asked a flight attendant out before.” Eventually he neglected his contracting business, divorced his wife and built his life around Kathi.

  They kept the secret from their spouses. They spent even more time together after Kathi and Lance separated. But then Lance, a success with four thriving firms, moved back into his home.

  “Our relationship took a step backward,” Russell testified. “We had to work out a schedule around when he was there.”

  He waited, he said, frustrated and unhappy. “Kathi said she was protecting family finances. She was very concerned about getting her share of the money, what was due her from her marriage.” She feared Lance might hide his assets. So when he was away on flights, the lovers regularly raided Lance’s car in the Eastern employee parking lot, he said, searching for papers relating to Kathi or her husband’s money. They found Lance’s .38-caliber revolver in the car, and Kathi seized it. “Here, take this, so we don’t get shot,” she said, according to Russell. He took it.

  Russell even knew the secret combination to Lance’s locked briefcase: 7-2-7. The dead pilot’s brother covered his eyes during that testimony. The combination was correct.

  Russell wanted to get married, but Kathi insisted they wait until “the time was right.”

  In evidence were stacks of greeting cards from Kathi, including her last one: The two of us together … All I want. Love on Valentine’s Day and Always, Kathi.

  Russell read aloud a three-page memo he wrote himself nearly a year before the murder. Methodically listed were the facts of the tortured affair and his options. Murder was never an option. He choked with emotion as he read his feelings, “very much in love with her. Worship her.”

  While he remembered watching Kathi and Lance ride arm-in-arm aboard an Eastern Airlines float during Miami’s New Year’s Eve Orange Bowl parade, he could not remember driving to their home the night of the murder. Only nightmarish snatches: “Headlights, shining on me. A really bad pain”— when he was shot. “I think I remember firing a gun three times.” Then, at the wheel of his pickup truck, saying aloud, “I’m passing out,” moments before the truck crashed into a pole.

  He admitted feeling guilty about the affair and about Lisa. From age four she had shared their secrets. “Kathi would tell her not to tell her father. I thought it was bad for her to learn whatever she was learning from this double life.”

  Harold Russell trembled at his son’s testimony. “She put the gun in his hand and the idea in his mind. She killed Lance Anderson even though she didn’t pull the trigger. I’m bitter. I never met Lance Anderson, but I understand he was a fine man. If there is any way I can sue her for every penny she has, I will, for the children. She has destroyed so many lives.”

  Outside the courtroom Wendy Russell sobbed in the arms of a friend. “I tried not to cry,” she said, “but he started to cry … and he’s my dad.”

  Several jurors wept during closing arguments for the defense. “He was addicted to Kathi Anderson,” Hirschhom told them. “He might as well have been mainlining heroin.”

  Prosecutor Kahn remained unemotional. “Nowhere in this country is adultery or love a defense for first-degree murder. You may have a license to fly, but you don’t have a license to kill.” Kathi Anderson, he acknowledged, “is not a nice lady,” but, he pointed out, she was not on trial. “Kathi Anderson, the adulteress—let’s make her out to be the worst person in the world, but she had nothing to do with the murder.” He instructed jurors to “catch yourselves” if overwhelmed by emotion.

  They listened. After six hours of often loud and angry deliberation they returned with more tears and a verdict: guilty of murder in the first degree.

  Russell stood stoic, facing life, which means a twenty-five-year mandatory term. He will be old enough for Social Security by the time he is eligible for parole.

  “It was a nightmare to me,” said juror Juanita Wilson. “He is so sorry it happened, but he can’t undo it. I did what I had to do.”

  “Some of the jurors really cried,” said juror Bertha Mustafa. “We had to quiet each other down. Going by the letter of the law is a very hard thing. We constantly had to remind ourselves to put emotion aside. Everybody wanted to make the right decision.”

  “The men took it a little better than the women,” said foreman Howard Dorfeld. “There were only three men and we sort of had to stabilize the women.”

  “When there’s premeditation, there’s premeditation,” said juror Robert Matthewman. “He’s not a criminal. The woman had a lot to do with it, but he did premeditate it. A couple of women were very adamant for second degree, but their reasons were illogical. We made them see they had to go by the law.”

  Matthewman, the younger brother of two policemen, was as sympathetic as any juror could have been. He had been involved in a similar love triangle. He buried his face in his hands when they delivered the verdict. “My heart started racing. I was hyperventilating and my stomach was churning. I know how he felt about her. I know what a woman can do to you.”

  Matthewman’s own love triangle ended without violence.

  All swore they would never sit on a jury again.

  Sentencing was a formality. There were no options. Hirschhorn called it a death sentence. “It will be 2007 when he is paroled. Chances are minimal that he will survive those twenty-five horrible years. His life has come to an end.”

  Throughout the trial, the families of both pilots had occupied opposite sides of the high-ceilinged courtroom. First they avoided each other’s eyes. By midweek, they exchanged hesitant words. By the time it was over, they had joined forces.

>   “We are working on a plan of action,” the elder Russell said. “The Andersons are fine people. We will work together to make sure the children are taken care of, that Lisa is taken care of.”

  The Andersons hired private detectives to investigate the widow.

  Before he was sent to state prison, I visited Jerry Russell in the county jail. He tried to joke, but could not smile. He felt like Rodney Dangerfield, he said. “I get no respect.” When he told them he was a killer and demanded some space, his cellmates jeered. Guards did not even take the trouble to strip-search him after visiting hours.

  Even the woman he loved showed no respect.

  Kathi agreed to talk to me, after refusing for months. “I hope no man ever loves me like that again,” she pouted.

  Both still asked themselves why.

  “If Jerry Russell had not been wounded and had not been caught, there is no way I ever would have been convinced that he did it,” she said. “You have no idea the nights I have paced my living-room floor, trying to figure out what Jerry planned that night. I really do not think that love had anything to do with it. It was one of two things: greed or revenge.”

  Jerry too seemed in the dark. “I killed a man I didn’t know. If I had planned it and blown it, going to prison would be easier to accept. But I don’t know why I did it. I stepped out of my life and all the things I believe in and did a monstrous thing—and I don’t know why.”

  He hoped to talk to Kathi one last time. The affair was over “but I would like to clean up the loose ends and wrap it up.”

  “He did a super job of wrapping things up himself,” Kathi blurted. “I am scared to death of him. If I saw him a mile away, I would head for the nearest police station. The thought of him ever being out on the street terrifies me.”

  The twenty-five-year-minimum mandatory is not harsh enough, she said. He deserves death. “It was a cold-blooded, brutal murder. You have no idea how I miss Lance,” she said, voice quavering.

  The lovers each accused the other of lying.

  “Why did he say I was in bed with him that day?” She insisted that all they shared the day of the murder was a lunch date and wine. She heard Russell’s kiss-and-tell testimony during an evening newscast. “You have no idea what a crazy person I was. I was throwing things at the TV.”