But I Trusted You: Ann Rule's Crime Files #14

by Ann Rule

  If he could avoid it, John Henry Browne—who was still representing Teresa—didn’t want to call Morgan to the witness stand. She had already been through enough.

  Detectives had taken to calling Theresa Leonard the “good Theresa” and their prisoner the “bad Teresa.” Chuck’s sister loved Morgan dearly and was prepared to do anything she could to see that the child had a safe and happy life. Morgan and Theresa’s daughter soon became closer than just cousins; despite the gap between their ages, they eventually thought of each other as sisters.

  They were gradually achieving some degree of normalcy. Teresa had sent presents for Morgan before she fled; she complained that Morgan had never gotten them, but she had. Aunt Theresa was doing her best not to bad-mouth the woman whom she believed had murdered her brother—not for Teresa’s sake but for Morgan’s, and for Chuck’s sake, too.

  Because of her escape, Teresa Gaethe-Leonard had once again missed a trial date. A new date was set. She was scheduled to go on trial in two months. George Cody, the original lawyer who had been there for her right up until he discovered her empty apartment, withdrew from her case entirely. Cody had no choice; he was now on the State’s witness list to testify against Teresa.

  Teresa herself was back in the Snohomish County Jail, and not likely to be released; her bail was now $5 million, and she had no one left who would gamble anywhere near that much money on her. She steadfastly clung to her not-guilty plea in Chuck’s death.

  John Henry Browne was preparing a complicated defense, made more difficult for him when his client jumped bail and disappeared. Still, her behavior whenever she was free from a jail cell made his plea believable. Snohomish County Superior Court Judge Charles French accepted Browne’s plea of “innocent by reason of insanity.”

  This was a woman who had twice attempted suicide with overdoses of drugs and alcohol. Browne had her examined by a forensic psychologist who was prepared to testify that Teresa was legally insane at the time she killed her estranged husband, according to the M’Naughten Rule. M’Naughten stipulates that the defendant must be incapable of discerning the difference between right and wrong at the time of his or her crime.

  Usually, if a suspect plans and prepares for her crime, flees from the scene, and makes efforts to cover up evidence, she can be construed to be aware of the difference between right and wrong during that criminal act. Joyce Lilly’s statements to detectives—four of them at this point—indicated that Teresa had planned Chuck’s murder, even to the point of picking out her “disguise” clothes and entering his house on a dry run three months before she actually shot him.

  And Teresa had covered up her crime afterward by insisting that Joyce hide the murder gun, her clothes and boots, and the key to Chuck’s house. Teresa had even hidden her car in Joyce’s garage.

  She seemed to be in her right mind before, during, and after she shot Chuck.

  But how does anyone know what is going on in someone else’s mind at any time? Brains don’t have picture windows.

  At John Henry Browne’s request, Teresa was transferred to Western State Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.

  Trial dates passed in March, April, and May 1998 and either the State or the Defense had reasons to seek delays. The prosecution added twenty-eight new witnesses, and John Henry Browne was defending another high-profile case in Seattle. He argued that he couldn’t possible interview the latest witnesses before trial. If he could not get a continuance, he said he would seek a review by the state court of appeals.

  At length, a fall date in 1998 was chosen for Teresa’s trial. Chuck Leonard had been dead for seventeen months, and there had been no justice one way or the other stemming from his murder. Teresa’s psyche was deemed so fragile that she had spent many weeks in late spring in Western State Hospital, a mental health treatment facility, where she was evaluated, tested, and counseled by psychologists and psychiatrists there.

  She was given an IQ test, but the psychologist administrating the test noted that Teresa failed to expand on her answers, even when she was urged to do so. She hurried through questions, and by the end of the test had stopped writing down answers altogether. It wasn’t surprising that her full-scale IQ was only 83. This put her in about the 15th percentile, meaning that about 85 percent of people who had taken the test scored higher than she did.

  How could that be? A normal IQ (depending on the test given) is between 90 and 110. To finish a four-year college, most students need an IQ of at least 120. How could Teresa have managed a busy concierge desk at a large hotel, fielding calls and requests from guests, or taken care of all the banking and record keeping at The Consignment Shop if her IQ was only 83? For that matter, how could she have been so clever when she helped the female detectives fill in their crossword puzzle on the flight home from Puerto Rico?

  Depression certainly can lower intelligence scores, but not to this extent. It seemed possible that Teresa was deliberately trying to appear a lot dumber than she really was.

  With her trial looming in September, Teresa was sent once more to Western State Hospital to be sure she was capable of participating in her own defense. She would remain there until her trial began.

  On September 8, 1998, the doctors at Western State Hospital determined that Teresa was competent to stand trial. Her day in court had been postponed six times, but now it was time. If she was found guilty, Teresa faced a minimum of twenty-five years in prison.

  The Defense’s original plan had been to show that she didn’t really know what she was doing when she shot Chuck Leonard—that she was insane under the law. Gradually, it had shifted, and with her competency established, their new approach was to show a jury that she had cause to kill her estranged husband, that almost any mother would have done the same. Teresa, they would argue, had been protecting her little girl from a sexually abusive father. If so, she very likely had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

  Although PTSD had become the proper term for the stress reaction during the Gulf War, the concept has been around for decades, affecting those caught up in events “beyond normal human experience.” War isn’t normal for most young soldiers who never expected to shoot to kill. PTSD was called “shell shock” in World War I, and “battle fatigue” in World War II. It was probably called something else in the Civil War and the Revolutionary War.

  There are other events that can be construed as beyond normal human experience, and Teresa’s defense team believed she had suffered through many of them, enough to cause her mind to splinter into too many shards to count.

  Teresa told some of her doctors that her father had spanked her so hard when she was a child that she had been knocked unconscious. She told others that she had only had the wind knocked out of her.

  Her sisters agreed to come from Louisiana to testify about the sexual abuse in their home when they were young. Having endured sexual abuse herself, wouldn’t Teresa Gaethe-Leonard have been even more horrified to believe that her own child was suffering as she had?

  In similar cases across the United States, mothers who have shot sex offenders who molested their children have either been acquitted or given short sentences. And the public—including the jurors—had been pulling for them. Most would agree that a mother’s love is probably the most protective and unselfish kind of love.

  The Snohomish County investigators hadn’t encountered acquaintances of Teresa’s who recalled that she was concerned about Chuck molesting Morgan. They asked friends and relatives of the couple if they recalled any concern on her part about that.

  Chuck’s father and stepmother said that Teresa had complained on occasion that she was worried because Chuck sometimes left Morgan alone in his house while he worked outside in the yard. But they’d never heard about any suspected sexual abuse.

  Defense investigators found employees and friends of Teresa who recalled that there were times when Morgan didn’t want to go to her father’s house. She told Joyce Lilly once that she didn’t like him t
o touch her. That had occurred when she wanted to call her mother and he wouldn’t let her.

  There was an occasion when she left The Consignment Shop with Chuck, but had come running back in, saying she didn’t want to go. That was in one of Joyce’s statements, and it was allegedly the reason Joyce and Teresa had given Morgan teddy bears with their phone numbers hidden in their pockets, a move instigated by Teresa.

  A woman who had visited Teresa’s shop had once seen Morgan, age three or four, climbing under clothing racks without underpants on.

  Joyce Lilly’s recall of Teresa and Chuck’s marriage, and about the way they treated Morgan, was often one of confusion. Joyce, who was very modest, questioned Teresa about why Morgan was happier without a lot of clothing on; the four-year-old often emulated her father, dropping coats and shoes from the moment she walked through her own—or Joyce’s—front door and dancing around happily. Teresa had pooh-poohed her concern.

  “We’re proud of our bodies in my family,” Teresa said calmly. “We don’t believe in false modesty.”

  On the other hand, Chuck was so paranoid that Teresa might accuse him of something that he had Morgan wear her bathing suit when he gave her a bath.

  Chuck’s friends were adamant that there were many times Morgan hadn’t wanted to go to Teresa’s house when her visit with her father was over. Chuck’s own diaries had passages that mentioned days when Morgan had clung to him and refused to go with Teresa. Separation and divorce are hard on children, and both parents were known to indulge Morgan, possibly to make up for the chaos in her young life.

  She was a very intelligent child and, like most children of divorce, Morgan caught on quickly that she could play one parent against another to get what she wanted.

  Jan, Chuck’s friend and neighbor down the block, was married by this time and he and his wife, Sandy, often babysat for Chuck. Sandy recalled years later, “There is no way that little girl was molested. We would have known because we spent so much time with her.”

  Brad Pince had worked for years investigating sex crimes against children, and he sincerely doubted that Morgan had suffered abuse. If Teresa had been so concerned about it, why hadn’t she mentioned molestation in her divorce filings? Why hadn’t she reported it to the authorities? And why had she been so casual about having at least one male neighbor in her apartment building—whom she didn’t know well—babysit for Morgan? It didn’t add up.

  Moreover, Pince knew it was a favorite fall-back ploy that angry estranged wives used in custody wars: when all else failed, women were more likely to accuse their exes of abusing their children. Of course, it was sometimes true, but it was a fist in the belly, a horrible accusation, especially when it was made against a dead man who could no longer defend himself.

  Now it suddenly popped up at her trial like an ugly toadstool. From what Pince and the other investigators had learned about Chuck Leonard, he had indeed had a lively sex life—but with adult women, who seemed to understand that he was not interested in long-term commitments.

  Chuck idolized his little girl and saw himself as her protector. As Morgan grew, detectives had no doubt that Chuck would have been the kind of dad who scrutinized and intimidated any young suitor who wanted to date her.

  But a child abuser? An incestuous father? Never.

  Teresa’s defense stance now was that Chuck was sitting up in bed, wide awake, on the night he died and they were arguing. She had gone to his house in the early hours of the morning, carrying a gun, but only to talk to him about her concerns, and he had taunted her about Morgan. Her reaction was to shoot him. But all forensic evidence indicated he had been lying down, sound asleep, when the first bullet ripped into him.

  Chapter Eight

  Teresa Gaethe-Leonard’s trial before Superior Court Judge Gerald L. Knight promised to include a war of the psychiatrists and psychologists. Theirs was far from an exact science, and it would be up to the jury to decide who to believe. John Henry Browne maintained that Teresa’s mental state had deteriorated markedly since Chuck Leonard was killed, and that she no longer had any clear memory of the shooting, and that she never planned it.

  He did not dispute that she had, indeed, shot and killed Chuck Leonard, and there seemed to be no expectation that she could be found innocent—but she could be convicted of lesser offenses, like second-degree murder or manslaughter.

  Browne was a master debater, and a genius at planning and carrying out defense strategy, but he faced an uphill battle. Michael Downes, prosecuting for the State, had an abundance of physical evidence to show that Teresa had very carefully planned Chuck’s murder.

  With a manslaughter conviction, Teresa wouldn’t spend much time in prison. With premeditation and a first-degree conviction, she would be in prison until her hair turned gray and her face was lined with wrinkles.

  An eleventh-hour request to postpone Teresa’s trial once again came from Deputy Prosecutor Michael Downes. He and his team had been informed that John Henry Browne was prepared to argue an additional defense for Teresa—battered-woman syndrome.

  Judge Gerald Knight ruled that the trial would go forward as planned on September 9 and warned Browne not to elicit testimony that Teresa was a battered woman. If he did, Knight said firmly that he might declare a mistrial.

  Some in the courtroom wondered if Chuck Leonard might be considered a “battered man,” but they didn’t say it out loud.

  By the time the State and the Defense teams agreed on twelve jurors and two alternate jurors who would step in if any of the original dozen should become ill or step down, there were eleven women and one man on the jury, with two male alternate jurors.

  It was—and is—always difficult to say whether female jurors will empathize with a woman defendant. Would this jury, perhaps, judge Teresa Gaethe-Leonard more harshly because they knew how most normal women would react? Would the lone male see Teresa as a frightened, dependent woman in trouble? No one could say. The most important assets good jurors can have is the ability to listen carefully to witnesses from both sides, study the physical and circumstantial evidence, and eventually vote their consciences.

  What would the eleven women on Teresa’s jury think? Many of them had children and understood the power of mother love. Possibly some of them had had husbands who had strayed. There was no way of telling whether they would view Teresa as a victim and a heroine or as a husband-stealing plotter. Jurors’ own life experiences and lessons learned cannot be excluded from their decision making.

  That may well be a juror’s strongest talent. That, and the ability to stay awake and listen carefully for six or seven hours a day. Trials can be exciting, but they can also be dry and repetitive. The hours after lunch in a stuffy courtroom have put many a juror to sleep. And not a few journalists.

  One thing is true of any trial: neither the judge, the attorneys, the gallery, nor the defendant has ever been able to read a jury from the expression on their faces or their body language. They always surprise you when you talk to them after trial.

  For the first time, almost all of the people who had passed through Teresa’s life walked in and out of a single courtroom: her sisters Lois and Macie, but not her brother; Nick Callas, but not Gary Gaethe; Joyce Lilly, Rick Lilly, and George Bowden, Joyce’s attorney; Teresa’s employees at The Consignment Shop, women who had been her “best friends” for a while and then been dropped from her life; George Cody, Teresa’s first attorney; Michelle Conley, Chuck’s last lover; a dozen or more of Chuck’s friends and former girlfriends; Theresa Leonard, Chuck’s sister; his father and stepmother, Fred and Caroline Leonard; Doug Butler, Chuck’s teacher friend who had found his body; his boyhood friend from Bremerton where he grew up; his friend who owned a video-rental store; and the detectives from Snohomish County who had helped bring Teresa to trial: Brad Pince, John Padilla, Jim Scharf, Joe Ward, and Rob Palmer.

  The gallery in Judge Knight’s courtroom was packed almost every day in September and October as the weeks of trial unfolded. Teresa
’s story was like a teleplay script for a miniseries, only more shocking because it was real, and because it had happened in the town where many in the gallery lived. They had followed it during the nineteen months since Chuck Leonard was murdered, and wanted to know more about what had happened and why. Newspaper and television coverage had never told them enough.

  That wasn’t the reporters’ fault; so many details had been kept under wraps. Now, the press bench held media reporters from all over Washington State.

  It was still warm in mid-September and opening windows helped lower the stuffiness and heat in the courtroom, but that created another problem as street noise drifted in and made it difficult for the jurors to hear the witnesses and attorneys. Sirens from emergency vehicles often brought testimony to a halt.

  Senior Deputy Prosecutor Michael Downes asked the jurors to raise their hands if they couldn’t hear.

  Downes then began his opening remarks, explaining the State’s case: “The evidence the State will present to you will show that at approximately four or five in the morning of February 20, of 1997, the defendant drove twenty-five miles to her estranged husband’s house, that she walked into his house, down to his bedroom, shot and killed him with a .45-caliber automatic handgun by shooting him three times in the chest area. The fatal wound entered his chest, went into one of his lungs, and he bled to death internally as a result. …”

  Michael Downes knew this case so thoroughly that he probably could have made his opening statement in his sleep, but he glanced occasionally at his notes. The jury listened raptly as he described the Leonards’ relationship at the time Chuck was killed, the “rehearsal” for murder in November 1996, and the actual fatal shooting three months later. Downes promised to present witnesses to Teresa’s affair with Nick Callas, and to her plot to find a way to give him a baby, even though she knew she could not conceive herself.