1 A Small Case of Murder

by Lauren Carr

  Before the defense attorney or church pastor could stop her, Bridgette said, “Wilson had no proof of who poisoned Cindy.”

  “It’s interesting that you used the word ‘poisoned’.” Joshua’s lips curled.

  “Shut up, Bridgette,” her father warned.

  “I never said Cindy Rawlings was poisoned,” Joshua pointed out. “I only said she had been murdered.”

  “Well, I was there,” Bridgette scoffed. “She wasn’t shot. She wasn’t knifed. How else could she have been killed?”

  “She could have been smothered,” Tad suggested.

  “She was vomiting blood and having convulsions.”

  “Shut up, you stupid girl!” the reverend hissed.

  “According to your statement at the time, Mrs. Poole,” Joshua said, “you weren’t home when Cindy died.”

  “Why would anyone want to kill Wallace’s wife?” Clarence Mannings shot a cocky grin at his adversary.

  “To cover up the sins of the father.” Joshua strolled over to where Tad was sitting in the audience. “It all started on Cindy’s and Wally’s wedding night, when the bride made the fatal mistake of confessing to her new husband that she was in love with another man, Dr. Tad MacMillan.”

  “Wallace Rawlings killed his wife because she was in love with another man,” Clarence Manning said. “Why are you wasting our time prosecuting a dead man?”

  “No, Wally got his kicks out of making people miserable. If he had killed Cindy, then he’d miss out on the fun of torturing her. He refused to divorce her. For Cindy, divorcing her husband would be a sin. She vowed for better or worse, and it was the worst. Wally exacted his vengeance by making his wife cut off all relations with Tad MacMillan and her friends. He punished her emotionally by refusing to have marital relations with her, while at the same time embarking on an affair with another woman who bore his child. I have no proof, but I don’t doubt, knowing Wally the way I did, that he flaunted his affair to Cindy, purely to humiliate her. So, you can imagine Wally’s fury when Cindy got pregnant by what had to be another man.”

  Each member of the audience, making the same assumption, looked at Tad.

  The prosecutor reminded them, “Remember, I said that Wally had ordered Cindy to stay away from Tad.” He continued, “Cindy vowed to obey her husband. She did stay away from the man she loved. Yet, Wally couldn’t, and didn’t, believe her when she told him that Tad wasn’t their daughter’s father.” He asked with an exaggerated shrug, “Who else could have been the father?”

  “Wally was Cindy’s husband,” the reverend stated. “If Dr. MacMillan wasn’t Victoria’s father, then Wally—”

  “Wally told me they never consummated their marriage,” Sheriff Sawyer said.

  “He said the same thing to me,” Joshua told them.

  “Hearsay,” Mannings declared.

  “Blood isn’t hearsay,” Joshua said, “and blood doesn’t lie.”

  Tad said, “It was Vicki’s blood tests, done as part of the usual natal examination at the hospital when she was born, that told Doc Wilson that Wally wasn’t her father. There’s no way possible for a man and a woman who both have RH negative factor to produce a child with an RH positive blood type. One or both of the parents have to be RH positive.”

  “So obviously, sweet little Cindy was sleeping around,” Bridgette said.

  “A jury would call it rape. Multiple rape.” Joshua handed Mannings a copy of Wilson’s file on Cindy Rawlings. “In his statement, Doc Wilson recalls Cindy Rawlings having a panic attack when her father-in-law came into her bedroom without knocking.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” Mannings insisted.

  “It proves a factor of their relationship, which is that it was not a relationship of invited intimacy.”

  Mannings laughed. “Are you suggesting that my client was his granddaughter’s father?”

  “Yes, and we have the DNA tests to prove it,” Joshua announced before handing off the envelope Tad had given him earlier to the doctor.

  Tad took center stage. “It was one of those things where when you saw it spelled out you wondered why you didn’t see it before.”

  Reverend Rawlings challenged, “Even if I was Vicki’s father, there’s no way you can prove it. My lawyer blocked your prosecutor from taking any of my DNA due to just cause. You still don’t have just cause to get it.”

  “We didn’t need your DNA to prove it,” Tad said. “Have you forgotten already? Your son Wally was murdered. That made his body evidence. It was with his DNA that we found the evidence to prove that you fathered Vicki.”

  “And who was it that put this proof together?” Mannings’ sly grin under his walrus mustache indicated that he was already putting together his client’s defense.

  “The West Virginia state lab in Weirton.”

  “I don’t suppose you mentioned to the forensics people putting together these results that you had been intimately involved with Vicki’s mother.”

  Tad answered, “No, I did not.”

  Mannings circled Tad like a predator sizing up his prey. “So, I presume that you have determined that my client, not having his DNA, is Vicki Rawlings’ father, without the use of your own DNA to eliminate you as the father.”

  Tad yanked a sheet of paper from the envelope and presented it to Mannings. “Your presumption is incorrect. I voluntarily gave my DNA to a state medical examiner. They even recorded it on video to prove that is was my DNA, and no one else’s.” He gestured for Mannings to read the results. “There’s no way possible that I can be Vicki’s father.” He added, “Wally’s DNA proves the same thing. There’s no way that he could have been her father, however, there are enough common markers between Wally and Vicki to make them half siblings, just like DNA evidence found at the murder scene.”

  Bridgette interjected, “That proves that Wally killed Vicki.”

  Joshua pointed out, “Since Wally was Vicki’s half brother, that makes you her half sister, Bridgette.”

  Bridgette reacted with a snort.

  “Orville Rawlings was Vicki’s grandfather,” Mannings argued. “Of course, any tests will prove that he’s related to her, which is already an established fact.”

  The reverend announced, “I won’t dignify this perverted accusation by submitting any of my DNA to any tests.”

  “As I stated before, Reverend Rawlings, we don’t need any of your DNA to prove your relationship to Vicki,” Tad explained. “The DNA tests proved that Wally and Vicki were indeed related. The RH factor proves that they can’t be father-daughter. The markers prove that they shared a parent. It is a proven fact that they don’t have the same mother; therefore, they must share the same father. Since you’re Wally’s father, then you have to be Vicki’s father.”

  “And,” Joshua concluded, “in order to be Vicki’s father, you had to have intercourse with her mother, your son’s wife.”

  “None of this proves anything,” Clarence Mannings gestured for Reverend Rawlings not to say anything. “By the time we’re through, Commander Thornton, I’ll have this whole valley convinced Cindy Welch Rawlings was a bed-hopping nymphomaniac with a Daddy complex, who seduced her poor father-in-law in a weak moment.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Joshua responded.

  Disappointed, the witnesses thought Joshua had given up when he strolled up the aisle with Clarence Mannings’ smirk of superiority directed at his back.

  Tad took his envelope of evidence and returned to the audience.

  Reverend Rawlings stood up and smoothed his clothes. “Well, if you will excuse me—”

  Whirling around, Joshua roared at him. “I’m not through with you! Sit down!”

  To everyone’s surprise, including his, Reverend Orville Rawlings dropped back down into the chair.

  “No, we can�
��t prove you used that poor girl’s faith in your church, and her trust in you, to force her into submitting to your perverted punishments in the name of God, but Dr. Russell Wilson claimed it was murder, and I believe you killed her.”

  “Even if they were sleeping together, why, after years of her being married to his son would the reverend kill her? You would have better luck proving his son did it.” Clarence Mannings plopped down into his seat with an air of boredom.

  “Your client killed her because the worst thing imaginable happened.” Joshua turned to his cousin. “Dr. Tad MacMillan became a respectable citizen.”

  Joshua resumed pacing, this time up and down the aisle. “You see, as long as Dr. MacMillan was a drunken rebel, Cindy wouldn’t want to be with him. She could love him from afar and long for what could have been. Then, Tad MacMillan did the unimaginable. He sobered up. That made him appealing to Cindy. People started listening to him. The reverend knew that if Cindy spoke to Tad, which would surely happen with them living in the same town, the two of them might get together. If that happened, then a catastrophe would occur.”

  Seeing where the prosecutor was going, Curtis Sawyer uttered a gasp. “She would confide to him that the reverend had been raping her.”

  “If Cindy told Tad that while he was drinking, no one would listen to him. Now that he was sober, if she told him, he could do something. If the truth came out, the reverend would lose everything. That’s why Reverend Rawlings slowly started killing her.

  “Then, when the reverend learned that she had indeed spoken to Tad—I suspect he had his personal spy, Hal Poole, following her—he killed her with one final dose of arsenic. At first, Doc Wilson dismissed Cindy’s health problems as an ulcer brought on by a nervous condition. When she died, he thought her ulcer had hemorrhaged, until Tad informed him that Cindy said she thought she was being poisoned. Doc Wilson did a toxicology test and found the arsenic. Now, since he couldn’t prove who did it because Cindy told Tad it was Wally, he could only hang it over the family’s head as a major scandal if they didn’t behave themselves.”

  “Like you said,” the reverend retorted, “you can’t prove I did it.”

  “Just like Doc Wilson couldn’t prove you killed your wife, huh?”

  “Oh, please,” Clarence Mannings groaned as he stood up. “Do you plan on accusing my client of every death in his family tree?”

  “Just about,” Joshua said. “Oh, it is a very interesting family tree. You shake it and skeletons drop like rotten apples. You see, while everyone else bought that your client was a saint, Doc Wilson was too sharp to fall for his act. No one could pull the wool over his eyes. He believed Tad when he told him that Cindy had been murdered because he already knew the type of man your client was.

  “Doc Wilson knew something evil was going on when Eleanor Rawlings drowned in her bathtub. Back then, Doc wrote that he was bothered by two bruises on each ankle.”

  “My dear late wife wasn’t a well woman,” the reverend objected.

  Joshua didn’t slow down. “Your wife died four years before Cindy. Vicki was five years old when your wife died, which means that you had been raping Cindy for at least six years at the time of your wife’s death. Need I point out that Vicki told more than one witness that you had killed her grandmother? She must have seen something, and I have no doubt that was a factor in her rebellion.

  “Doc Wilson heard the rumors and was bothered by those bruises. While you had managed to get everyone in the valley to believe that a man of God could never do such an awful thing, you couldn’t convince Doc. Not only did he have suspicions about your wife’s death, but also he had the evidence that Vicki wasn’t Wally’s daughter.

  “That was enough to keep you in line. You were very aware that Dr. Russell Wilson was probably the one man in this valley people respected more than you. If he said you were a murderer and rapist, people would believe him. That’s why you ordered Wally to withdraw from the race for county prosecutor. That satisfied Doc Wilson enough to keep him quiet until Cindy was murdered. Then, he took another look at his report on Eleanor’s death and figured it out.”

  Joshua climbed up onto the stage to utter a stage whisper to the reverend. “We found the tub.”

  The reverend glared at him in silence.

  “It was painfully simple,” Joshua said. “Eleanor Rawlings drowned in an antique, stainless steel claw-footed tub in the master suite of the Rawlings mansion. It was hard, but we found that very same tub at the shop you had sold it to.”

  Joshua held up his hands to illustrate a picture frame. “Picture it. Eleanor Rawlings was taking her bath in her fancy antique tub when her dear reverend husband came in. He’s standing there talking away, lingering next to her feet, which were resting up on the edge, when he simply—”

  Joshua yanked his fists up into the air. Horrified by the vision of Reverend Rawlings drowning his frail wife, the audience gasped.

  To further imprint the image in their minds, Joshua waited before breaking the silence. “Eleanor Rawlings was an elderly woman in ill health. Killing her was as simple as drowning a kitten.”

  “Motive?” Clarence Mannings sputtered out his demand to know the answer to his question.

  “Everything was in her name.” Sheriff Sawyer indicated the massive building. “All of this. Everything. The land. The mansion. Eleanor’s father left everything to her.”

  “Sam Fletcher,” Tad said, “didn’t trust his son-in-law. He didn’t leave Rawlings a dime. He left it all to Eleanor, but she was passive enough to let her husband do with it as he wanted. If she had found out that her husband was raping their son’s wife, that may have been enough to make her leave him, take everything with her, and ruin Rawlings’ reputation by revealing the snake he really was.”

  The reverend laughed. “I suppose now you are going to say I drove my father-in-law nuts and made him jump off the Chester Bridge.”

  “LSD.” Tad strolled up to the steps leading up onto the stage. “When I read the revised autopsy report on Sam Fletcher’s death, I remembered a conversation I had with Doc Wilson. You see, Sam Fletcher died back in the late fifties. His death was ruled a suicide brought on by mental illness. But I remember very clearly how my father couldn’t understand how someone so together could suddenly go nuts. No one under-stood, especially Sam’s good friend, Doc Wilson.”

  Tad leaned on the stage and looked up at the reverend. “About a month after Cindy died, Doc calls me. Now, as my cousin mentioned, I was sober then, and I had built a new reputation. Doc Wilson never trusted me for anything, no matter how much I tried to help him. It was the only time, the one and only time, he called and asked me, of all things, about LSD. He knew I had experimented with it when I was a teen-ager. I told him about the hallucinations, the delusions; how some people had good trips and some had bad, and about a guy I knew who OD’d on it.

  “Then, he asked me how it would affect someone who was given doses of it without their knowing. How would he be perceived? I told him the doctors would think the patient had become schizophrenic and paranoid. Doc Wilson asked me if this patient would jump off a bridge. I said, ‘Yes, either to kill himself to end the trip, or because he thought he could fly.’”

  Tad squinted up at Reverend Rawlings. “Doc Wilson had put that conversation in Sam Fletcher’s file. He says that he had always been bothered by how Sam Fletcher died and, after speaking to me, he recommended that his body be exhumed so that tests can be run to see if LSD can be detected in his remains, which they can.”

  “Of course,” Joshua pointed out, “Doc Wilson could never get Fletcher’s body exhumed because you and Sheriff Delaney had the power to keep that from happening. Now that Delaney and your son, the prosecutor, are both dead, we should be able to get a look at Sam Fletcher’s body. Like Tad, I’m confident LSD will be found in his remains.”

  “How would I get LSD?
” the reverend laughed.

  “I’m glad you asked that question. Back in the 1950’s the CIA was experimenting with LSD to extort information from prisoners. They had it in Korea.”

  Joshua responded to Mannings’ question before the lawyer could utter the words. “As for motive, after Sam Fletcher died, Eleanor had control of her father’s land and money, and the reverend had control of Eleanor. Therefore, he had control of everything.”

  “But you have no proof,” Reverend Rawlings said. “I believe this is all called speculation. Sam Fletcher went crazy. He was crazy when I met him, and he was crazy when he threw himself off that bridge, and you can’t prove otherwise.”

  “That’s right,” Joshua said. “Those puzzles we can’t get you on. We can’t prove to a jury that you killed any of them. Just like we can’t prove you had Chuck Delaney give Lulu Jefferson that overdose of heroin.”

  “Who the hell is Lulu Jefferson?” Mannings yelled.

  “She was the young woman who wrote this letter to my mother.” Joshua pulled a copy of the letter out of his binder and handed it to the lawyer. “She recounts a night in which she, her date, and my parents found a dead body in an abandoned barn. They went to get Sheriff Delaney, and he made a phone call to a ‘deputy’.” Joshua made quotation marks with his fingers. “When they came back, the body was gone. That body is now in the morgue in Weirton. It was identified as Kevin Rice, who Lulu Jefferson saw in a picture in your client’s office years later. She made the fatal mistake of asking the reverend who he was. Suddenly, your client remembered she had seen the body in the barn and, being a man who took no chances, ordered Sheriff Delaney to eliminate her. Sheriff Delaney, being an officer in your client’s drug business, easily got his hands on the heroin to do the job. However, before Delaney could do the job, Lulu wrote a letter telling everything to my mother. Unfortunately, my parents never received the letter.”