The Kills

by Linda Fairstein

  "Then Andrew started peppering the child with questions about Benedict Arnold. 'Death to traitors,' he kept saying. 'You know what happens to traitors, don't you, boy?' Dulles knew about the betrayal of West Point and the Quebec campaign, but Andrew asked him something about the Battle of Valcour Island and the boy simply froze."

  "What did Andrew say to him next?"

  "He pointed at the closet door. 'The gun, Dulles, don't make me take out the gun again.'"

  Paige Vallis described how the boy's body shook in response to the threat. She got up from her chair and went to grab him by the hand, begging Andrew to stop and let her take the boy with her.

  "Did you attempt to leave the apartment?"

  "Objection."

  "Overruled. I'll hear this. Go on, Ms. Vallis."

  "Of course I did. I told Andrew I was going and I was taking Dulles with me. He stood in front of the door and told me the boy couldn't leave. He said that if I went to the police, he had people who would take care of me. Those were his exact words. I swore I wouldn't go to the police, that I just wanted Dulles to see a doctor. I wasn't worried about myself-this was all about the poor little boy."

  "Did Andrew Tripping step away from the door?"

  "No, no, he did not. He put his hand on the child's shoulder and asked him if he had forgotten about the gun. 'Death to traitors,' he repeated. 'Benedict Arnold was the scum of the earth.'"

  Paige Vallis lowered her head. 'That's when he stepped away from the door."

  "Did you open it?"

  "No, Miss Cooper. Not then."

  The logical thing to ask her was why, but the law wasn't always logical. She was not allowed to talk about the workings of her mind, just what she did and what she observed. "What happened next?"

  "Dulles broke loose from me and ran back to the chair. His father followed him."

  "What did you do?"

  "I stayed. I couldn't bear to leave the child in those circumstances."

  This was one of the biggest problems we faced with the jury. I might have proved the misdemeanor charge of Tripping's endangering the welfare of his own child, but not much more. At that moment on March 6, Paige Vallis had the clear opportunity to get herself out of harm's way. She had not witnessed any assault on Dulles Tripping and had no clear understanding of how he had been bruised. She heard Andrew refer to a gun, but had not seen any weapon nor been threatened with the use of one.

  "Objection," Peter Robelon said. "Move to strike."

  "Motion granted," Moffett said, tapping on the railing in front of him, telling the reporter to strike the comment about Paige not being able to bear leaving Dulles behind.

  But the jury had heard the words, and it was impossible to erase them from their minds.

  "What did the defendant do next?"

  "He took something out of his pocket. Something small. At first I couldn't see what it was. Dulles started to whimper. 'Please don't,' he said, over and over."

  "Did there come a time when you could tell what the object was?"

  "Tweezers. It was a small pair of metal tweezers. He leaned the child's head back, and inserted the tweezers in his nose."

  Juror number four slinked down in her seat and closed her eyes. Squeamish, I guessed. An appropriate reaction. Number eight leaned forward and seemed to enjoy the detail. Too much television, no doubt.

  "What did you do?"

  "I ran to stop him. But I couldn't. He had already placed them in the child's nostril, and I was afraid I'd cause more damage if I shook his arm. In seconds, he pulled a bloody piece of cotton out of the boy's nose."

  "Was there any discussion about that?"

  "Yes, Andrew told me he had packed Dulles's nose to stop some earlier bleeding, before he came out to meet me for dinner. It looked to me as if the stuffing must have caused as much pain as the initial blow."

  "Objection, Judge."

  "Sustained."

  Jurors were listening intently, some of them occasionally glancing over at the defense table to see whether Andrew Tripping was reacting to Paige Vallis's testimony. I desperately needed the testimony of Dulles himself. Without him, there was only this hint of what his father's nightly torture routine had been.

  The luncheon recess interrupted the narrative's drama once again. Neither Paige nor I felt like eating. She noshed on a sandwich and I played with a salad, knowing how likely I was to develop a crushing headache by midafternoon with the combination of the stress level escalating during the proceedings and my failure to eat.

  Back on the stand, Paige took us through the rest of the bizarre evening. Eventually, at some point after midnight, Andrew allowed Dulles to change into pajamas and go to sleep on the narrow cot that had been placed in the alcove off the kitchen.

  Then, Vallis said, Andrew spent more than two hours telling her about the terrible pressures of raising the boy alone.

  "It must have been two o'clock in the morning," she went on. "Andrew stood up in front of me. 'You're going to come inside,' he said. 'I want you to come in and take off your clothes.'"

  "What did you do?"

  "'No,' I said to him." Vallis tried to stay composed as she looked at me, instead of at the jurors. "'Don't do this, Andrew.' That's what I said."

  "Did Andrew respond?"

  "Yes. He said, 'Don't make me hurt you. Don't make me hurt my son.'"

  "What did you do, Paige?" I asked.

  "I had no choice. I, I-"

  "Objection, Your Honor. The jury will decide that," Robelon said, smirking at the panel.

  "Sustained."

  "I went into the bedroom and did exactly what Andrew Tripping told me to do," Paige said, finally getting angry with Robelon. "I was afraid he'd kill his son, and I was afraid he would do something to hurt me."

  "From the time that Dulles went to sleep, did Andrew ever mention his gun again?"

  Vallis answered softly. "No."

  "Did you ever see a gun in the apartment?"

  "No."

  "Did you see any other weapons?"

  "Lots of them. Odd things, hanging on his walls and on table-tops. Machetes and swords and arcane-looking things with blades. I wouldn't even know what to call some of them."

  "Did he threaten you with any of them?"

  "No. Not explicitly."

  Robelon and I would both try to use this fact to our advantage. He would argue that Tripping had the means to scare his companion into submission, if he had needed to threaten her into sex. I would say that a sign of her credibility was that despite the presence of so many sharp objects, she had never exaggerated the kinds of threats that the defendant made.

  Paige Vallis went on to describe the sexual assault, which occurred for the next hour in Tripping's stark bedroom. Not a word was exchanged between them after he demanded that she undress and get onto the bed. He moved and positioned her as he desired, subjecting her to a variety of sexual acts that I made her detail for the jurors. She cried, she told them, from the moment she crossed the threshold into the room until her tormentor fell asleep beside her.

  "What time was that?"

  "Four o'clock in the morning, roughly."

  "Did you leave then?"

  "No. I just lay still in the bed until I could see daylight through the crack in the blinds. I got up and dressed myself. Quietly, very quietly. I awakened Dulles and helped him to put his clothes on. That's when I saw even more bruises, on his forearms and thighs. Andrew must have heard-"

  "Objection."

  "There was a noise in Andrew's bedroom, so I hurried the boy along. When the two of us got to the front door, Andrew was in the hallway near the living room. I told him I was walking Dulles to school, and that I had written my home phone number on the telephone pad in case I could help in the future."

  "What did he say?"

  "He asked again if I was going to the police, and started to walk towards us. I turned to face him, putting the boy behind me, nearer the stairwell that led to the building's exit."

  "Did you a
nswer him?" I asked.

  "Yes, I did. I told him not to worry, not to come any closer, either. 'I can't go to the police,' is what I said to Andrew Tripping. 'I killed a man last year.'"

  12

  We take our witnesses as we find them, as I had told the jury in my opening statement. Now they would hear for themselves what had happened to Paige Vallis several months before she met Andrew Tripping.

  "Is that statement you made to the defendant about killing a man true?"

  Paige was strangely calmer now, as she told the story. "Yes, it is." She shifted her body in the chair and faced them squarely. "I mean, not on purpose. Shortly after last Thanksgiving, my father died. He was almost eighty-eight years old and passed away in his sleep.

  "He had lived alone, in a small house in Virginia, since he retired more than twenty years ago. I was the only child-he had married late, and never really wanted a large family because of all the moving around his professional life entailed."

  Robelon was on his feet, objecting again. "Your Honor, this would be a lovely retrospective for the Biography Channel," he said snidely, drawing a few smiles from the jury box, "but I think that all we need to know is that Ms. Vallis killed a man. Period."

  "May we approach?" I asked.

  Moffett waved my witness off the stand and away from the bench, while we conferenced the issue. "Where are you going with this, Alexandra?"

  "If Peter doesn't intend to cross-examine my witness about how and why she-uh, she got into the situation she did, I'll leave it alone. But if he plans to ask a single question about the man's death, I'm going to bring out the facts on my direct. Ms. Vallis has got nothing to hide."

  "How about it, Pete?"

  "I've got a couple of questions for her, sure. But I'd rather give them up and move this along."

  "You're telling me you're not going to touch the subject in summation, either?" I asked. I knew that when Robelon heard all the facts, he would be eager to remind the jury that Vallis had once defended herself when she was in mortal danger. He would say she was just as capable of defending herself against Tripping. I wanted to compare and contrast the circumstances, acknowledging-as she did-that it was the boy's life, not her own safety, that had concerned her on the night of March 6.

  "I won't concede that."

  Moffett was ready to think like Solomon and split the baby. "Alex, what are you trying to bring out here? That Ms. Vallis killed a man in self-defense? She have a weapon?"

  "She didn't, Your Honor. There was an intruder-he's the one who had a knife. He held it to her throat and they struggled over it, and when they fell to the floor, he landed on the knife."

  "Okay. So I'll allow you to ask that much. Skip over 'This is your life, Ms. Vallis.' You," Moffett said, addressing Peter Robelon. "I'm gonna limit you, too. Nothing beyond the scope of Cooper's direct, then short and sweet in summation."

  That meant Moffett was reading the jury as already being in Robelon's favor. He was trying not to prolong my agony.

  Paige recounted the short version of the event. I took her back to the night of the crime, letting her tell the panel that Tripping allowed her to walk out with his son after hearing that statement. I would later argue that the reason the defendant stayed in the apartment, the reason he didn't flee before the police arrived, is that he believed what Paige Vallis told him and thought she would not go to the police.

  "What did you do when you left the apartment?"

  "I got out on the sidewalk with Dulles. I needed to explain to him what I was going to do. I wanted him to understand that he wouldn't get hurt any more if I told the police, to know that he was entitled to be safe in his home. The first thing I did was take him to a coffee shop. I bought him breakfast-I don't think-excuse me, sir. He didn't look as though he'd had a real meal in months-and talked to him for almost an hour. Then, on our way out, I found the first uniformed policeman around, and asked him to drive us to the station house."

  I could anticipate Robelon's cross now. So, Ms. Vallis, I expected him to say to her, after you were raped- beforeyou went to the police, before you talked to a doctor-you had two eggs over easy with a side order of bacon? Or were they scrambled? Did you back up your coffee with a mimosa or a Bloody Mary?

  "And when you finished making your statement at the police station, where did you go?" I asked.

  "To the hospital. They took me to Bellevue Hospital."

  "Were you examined there?"

  "Yes, by a nurse. I think they call them forensic nurse examiners. She did a very thorough physical exam."

  I started to take Paige through the many steps of the painstaking procedure necessary to complete a rape evidence collection kit, everything from swabs for DNA to pubic hair combings to finger-nail scrapings.

  "We'll stipulate to the medical findings," Robelon said.

  Of course he would. None of them was harmful to his client.

  "Did you sustain any injuries, Ms. Vallis?"

  "No, no, I did not."

  Physical injury was not an element of the crime of rape. In fact, fewer than a third of women reporting sexual assault have any external signs of injury or abuse. I couldn't go into that with Paige, but the nurse examiner would be qualified as an expert next week and take us through those facts.

  "Did you ever see or speak with Dulles Tripping again?"

  "No, I did not."

  "Until you walked into this courtroom this morning, did you ever see or speak with the defendant again?"

  "Never."

  I finished all the steps of my direct examination, cleaned up the loose ends, and told the court that I had no further questions of this witness. It was shortly before four o'clock in the afternoon, and a quick look over my shoulder confirmed that the spectator seats were still completely empty.

  Robelon stood to begin his cross, but the judge wiggled the pinky ring in his direction and we both approached the bench. "That woman ought to be here with the kid any minute. Why don't we hold this until Monday morning?"

  "I'm ready to go, Your Honor."

  I knew that Robelon wanted to ask his first few questions. If he started with Paige Vallis, she would then be directed to have no conversation with me about the case throughout the weekend. The strategy was obvious, and though I objected, I really had no grounds, nor any reason to discuss the evidence with her. My curiosity about Harry Strait, who had not reappeared, would have to wait until she was off the stand.

  It was also clear that Robelon didn't want the jurors to linger over her previous testimony with any sympathetic thoughts during the two-day hiatus. He wanted to score a few points about Paige's lack of injury that would sink in their minds over the weekend, so that they would be receptive to his consent defense.

  "Good afternoon, Ms. Vallis, I'm Peter Robelon," he said, communicating the fact that in contrast to my easy familiarity with the witness, he had never met her before. "I see from your hospital records that there were no signs of trauma in your physical exam, is that correct?"

  "It is."

  "Any bleeding?"

  "No."

  "Redness or swelling, internally?"

  "I-uh, I wouldn't know."

  "Well, no discomfort that you complained of, was there?"

  "Not once I left your client's bedroom."

  "No lacerations that needed stitching or sutures?"

  "No."

  "No follow-up treatment necessary, was there?"

  "Yes, actually, there was. I had to be tested for sexually transmitted disease," Paige told defense counsel, now looking at him instead of the jury. "I was quite worried about being forced to have unprotected sex." Robelon had made the same slip that many lawyers did, failing to get someone to interpret the seemingly illegible notes in the body of the medical record.

  He bluffed his way through a few more questions and must have decided to give them a more careful review before going on. Within ten minutes, he told the court he was ready to suspend the proceedings for the day.

  Moffett exc
used the jurors for the weekend, told the court officers to escort Paige Vallis to the witness room until I made arrangements for her to leave, and asked his clerk to call Ms. Taggart's office to see why she and Dulles were delayed.

  Mercer Wallace had come up at three-thirty, as we had arranged earlier, so that he could wait for Paige and drive her home. He was sitting with her when I went to the witness room.

  "Alex," she said, getting to her feet as I walked in, "I want to apologize again for what happened this morning. For-for leaving out that stuff about Harry Strait. I'd like to explain-"

  "I'd like it, too, Paige. But it's got to wait until next week. Months ago you told me straightaway you had killed a man during a struggle for your life, but you couldn't even own up about a former lover who's somehow entangled in this mess?"

  Mercer shook his head from side to side, wanting me to back off, cut Paige some slack.

  "I'm trying to tell you I'm sorry. I had no idea it would be relevant."

  "Okay, okay. Look, I can only talk to you about administrative things while you're Robelon's witness," I said, squaring away when Mercer would deliver her back here on Monday.

  Maxine had followed me in and handed back Paige's pocketbook. Mercer picked up her briefcase, which she had left in my office.

  "I don't know what to do with this, Alex, other than give it to you," Paige said, opening the clasp and removing a brown paper bag. "The hospital mailed this to me because they didn't have a home address for Dulles, once he was put in foster care."

  I reached in and pulled out a blue baseball jacket. The wordYANKEES was written across the back of the windbreaker in white lettering, and the team logo was on the front breast. I smiled. At least the boy and I had one thing in common.

  "I thought I'd see him here today, and be able to give it to him myself," she went on. "That's why I hung on to it. I'd like to talk to him, to see how-"

  "Forget that one, Paige," I said. "Maybe when this is all over. I couldn't let you do that now, even if I wanted to. But this is going to be very useful to me, when I actually get to meet Dulles. It'll be a great icebreaker. Maybe I'll get him a cap to go with it."