Lobster Boy

by Fred Rosen

  “I was about seven. We lived on Trenton Street in Gibsonton. I traveled with the show every year I was part of the household.”

  Arnie wanted to know how often Grady was home when they were off the road.

  “He was never home that often. He was out at bars,” Donna answered.

  “Ever see him drunk?”

  “Quite often.”

  “And the mother/father relationship?”

  “A lot of fighting and arguing. My dad yelled a lot at my mom.”

  “Did he strike her?”

  “Yes, he did. He called her dirty names. He choked her in 1972 on Trenton Street.”

  “What happened?”

  “He got on top of her and put his thumb in her throat.” Teresa always made the kids go off to the bedroom when they were fighting. As for disciplining the kids, “He would spank us with whatever he had at the time. His belt.”

  “Buckle too?”

  “Both.”

  “Did your father have a man work for him, Paul Fishbaugh, also known as The Fat Man?”

  “Yes.”

  Arnie asked Donna how Grady would perform his act.

  “My dad talked about the history of the condition in his family. Sometimes, he walked across the platform on his hands.”

  Whether he was drunk or sober, “She [Teresa] would do just about anything he asked her to do.”

  Then Arnie turned the conversation to Grady’s marriage to Barbara and the alcoholism and physical abuse in that household.

  Donna testified that Grady would beat Barbara up and “… how he’d bite her.…”

  And then Donna told the court the whole story of how she had fallen for Jack Layne, and how that led to Grady killing her fiancé.

  Looking down from the window at Jack’s lifeless body cradled in Donna’s arms, Donna testified that Grady smiled. “He looked just like he did the day he died.”

  Years later, when her mother told her she was dating her father again, Donna told her, “He’s never gonna change.”

  After their remarriage, there was an “icy cold look to his face. He looked like he did in Pittsburgh.”

  On cross, Spoto asked, “Were you present for any threats on your mother’s life by your father?”

  Donna hesitated before answering.

  “No,” she finally stated.

  Then Spoto established that she was married to Joe Miles.

  “He’s a tall guy, good-looking, with a receding hairline?”

  “Very receding,” Donna answered with a trace of a smile.

  “What did you do in the carnival for your father?”

  “My husband and I ran the gorilla show.”

  “A real gorilla?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a fake?”

  “Yes.”

  Under further questioning, Spoto was able to elicit from Donna that Teresa was a jack-of-all-trades in the carnival, that she did a little bit of everything to help out, that she was anything but a helpless woman.

  And that was it. Donna stepped down. With shoulders bowed, she left the courtroom.

  After the afternoon break for lunch, the experts that Arnie Levine had struggled so long and hard to allow in, would begin their testimony.

  Right from the start, Hanes’s strategy with the experts was to let them have their say. Regardless of whether Teresa Stiles suffered from battered spouse syndrome or not, he believed that she was not justified in arranging the death of her husband. Period.

  All Hanes could hope was that, in the end, the jury would agree with him.

  First up was Dr. Sidney J. Merin.

  A clinical psychiatrist in private practice, he frequently testified in Hillsborough County court cases requiring expert psychiatric testimony. He was a hired gun; he’d testify for defense and prosecution alike. This time, he was on the defense side.

  “Mrs. Stiles told me of the condition in the home between her and her husband, that he’d punctured at her eye, twisted her nipples, and [tried to] tear them off. He said he’d indeed kill her but didn’t say when, and had severely threatened her children.”

  Merin testified that the threats against her kids were particularly important in terms of her state of mind, because she had previously lost two children.

  “She was in a state of constant threat,” Merin continued. “She related how he was a very heavy drinker. [After drinking] he became mean, nasty and violent, injurious and battering. She related that this had happened on the day of the shooting.

  “She said she returned to Grady because she’d seen him and got the impression he’d stopped drinking and now their relationship could proceed with the love and affection she wanted.”

  Merin had given her a battery of tests meant to score her intelligence level. Overall, she had an 88 IQ, which was in the low to average range.

  Further tests showed her to be a victim of chronic and long-term depression. “She views herself as having a strong conscience, conservative and traditional. She has a tolerant, more passive personality. She doesn’t like to act out, is very feminine and views herself as a moral person and wants to view herself as being above human foibles.

  “She needs other people to give to her. She is not assertive. She has things happen to her.”

  It was Merin’s conclusion that Teresa Stiles suffered from battered spouse syndrome. “These people [in battered spouse syndrome] learn how to be helpless,” Merin explained. “They view themselves as dependent, inferior, lack self-confidence as a consequence of the batterer removing their independence.”

  He went on to explain that during his examination, she had vague memories of the crime and its planning, which is consistent with those suffering from battered spouse syndrome. “If we understand battered spouse syndrome is an entity in and of itself, it also includes features associated with a dissociative reaction. They lose memories. They detach themselves. The memory is sketchy, easily confused, and will give you different stories. They are helpless.”

  To Teresa, the threat from Grady was always there.

  “‘I’ll kill you, but you won’t know when.’ For herself, she acted reasonably at that time.”

  On cross-examination, Hanes tried to focus on the concept of learned helplessness, that if Teresa Stiles had learned, through her marriages to be helpless, why was she able to do so many things?

  For instance, wasn’t she able to get a lawyer to represent her interests when her first husband left her?

  Merin could not recall recording information on her first marriage. He also did not recall her telling him about hiring a lawyer to represent her interest after her second marriage was dissolved.

  “She’s not a blithering idiot,” Merin blurted out. “She was seduced” by Grady. “I don’t know she wanted to kill him. But she wanted to do something about him.”

  Hanes wanted to know what he thought of Teresa and Glenn being out of the house just at the moment the murder was committed.

  Merin slid through that one. “I think it was interesting that the family was out of the house at the time of the murder.”

  On redirect, Arnie asked him what he thought about Teresa’s actions.

  “I had an opinion that she had no alternative [but to have Grady killed].”

  Dr. Marti Loring was a clinical social worker who had flown to Tampa to testify in the trial.

  She had examined Teresa on June 24, 1994, in her Atlanta office. She had subsequently come to Tampa and interviewed her for eight hours on July 14.

  In a low, tentative voice, as if she was afraid someone was listening, Dr. Loring testified that on November 29, 1992, Teresa Stiles suffered from a very severe case of battered spouse syndrome.

  Even if Teresa left Grady, “She believed he’d find and stalk her.”

  “Is it your opinion that that belief is reasonable?” Arnie inquired.

  “Yes, sir,” Dr. Loring answered. “She believed if she left, she’d bring on the death of her children.”

  On cross, prosecutor Hanes
tried to get Dr. Loring to admit that Teresa had accepted the responsibility for Grady’s murder when she gave her confession to the police.

  “No, sir, she gave a semi-denial,” Dr. Loring countered.

  And then she stepped down and primly left the courtroom for an afternoon flight back to Atlanta. Even with her quiet voice and manner, she had been a most persuasive witness.

  “The defense calls Dr. Arturo Gonzalez.”

  Dressed in a navy blue blazer—red handkerchief peeking out of the pocket—gray slacks, red-and-blue patterned tie, and white shirt, Dr. Gonzalez cut a dapper figure on the witness stand. Handsome, tanned face, crowned by a luxuriant growth of white hair, the Cuban-born psychiatrist looked positively regal.

  He was also a helluva witness.

  “It was a kill or be killed situation,” he testified in English, with a Spanish lilt.

  “Was she suffering from battered spouse syndrome?” Arnie probed.

  “On November 29th, definitely, absolutely, suffering from battered spouse syndrome.”

  He explained that with this syndrome, the person being battered does not seem able to break from the abuser, and so continues the cycle of abuse.

  Levine also brought up the rather humiliating fact that Dr. Gonzalez had originally been retained by the prosecution as their expert witness, but because he had come to the conclusion that Teresa suffered from battered spouse syndrome, had been forced to be removed as a prosecution witness.

  “Did Mrs. Stiles talk of being threatened on the night her husband was murdered?” Hanes asked on cross.

  “On the evening Mr. Stiles was killed, she related no threats,” Dr. Gonzalez said. But she did talk about being choked by him that day, and Grady trying to poke her eye out during a particularly violent episode.

  During the afternoon break, I stepped outside for some air. I stood on the steps of the courthouse, looking at the overcast, gray sky.

  After a while, I decided to go back in. That’s when I saw Donna Miles sitting alone, smoking a cigarette on the courthouse steps.

  It was easy to miss her. A pale, nondescript face and white clothes made her look washed-out.

  “How ya doin’?” I asked.

  “Okay.”

  She sucked smoke deep into her lungs.

  “I hear you and Joe are truckers now.”

  She nodded.

  “What kind of trucking you do?” I asked.

  “Independent stuff. Refrigerated trucks.”

  “What’s it like out on the road?”

  “You mean in between the bumps?”

  I smiled.

  “You get a lot of time to think.”

  “I was in Pittsburgh and went to the house where you lived.”

  She looked me in the eye.

  “Really?”

  “Do you ever think about Jack?”

  “That was such a long time ago.”

  “What do you remember about him?”

  She exhaled.

  “That he was young. So young. You know, it’s funny.”

  “What is?”

  “In 1978, my dad killed a seventeen-year-old and in 1992, he was killed by a seventeen-year-old. It’s history reversed.”

  She stamped the cigarette under the heel of her plain, flat pumps and walked back into the courthouse.

  Twenty

  July 25.

  The tape arrived in a FedEx package. I played it on the VCR in my hotel room. The dialogue was as I remembered, only now, it all fit.

  There were Grady and Little Grady wrestling, and Donna and Mary Teresa egging them on in the background. If Levine had introduced the tape with sound in the courtroom, it would make Grady look, at worse, like a father who wrestled too roughly with his son.

  Without sound, Grady looked like a brutal, sadistic father. Maybe he really was, but not on that tape. And copies without sound had been sent to all the media.

  I went downtown to a video store and dubbed the tape, then drove to the courthouse.

  I had missed the morning testimony of the experts. At a little past noon, I rushed through the court corridor and took the elevator up to Hanes’s office. I flagged him down as he went by and said, “Let’s talk in your office.”

  Hanes, Spoto, and myself sat down in his office to talk.

  The place was a little messier than the last time I was in it. Some of the files were strewn about, just what you’d expect from an attorney who was on trial.

  Hanes sat behind his cluttered desk, Spoto and I in armchairs in front of him.

  I handed the tape across to Hanes.

  “You did the right thing,” Hanes said.

  “This is now evidence in a murder trial. I’m going to argue that we have the right to see the original tape.”

  “Yes, we do,” Spoto asserted.

  “But Arnie did say we never asked to begin with to see the original,” Hanes said, legal mind coming into play.

  “Well, we’ll see what we can do,” Spoto countered.

  A half hour later, we were all back in the courtroom.

  With the jury excused, Spoto argued before Judge Fuente that the prosecution be allowed to enter into evidence a copy of the videotape they had obtained, but with sound.

  “Mr. Levine, did you know that the tape had sound?” Fuente asked.

  “I knew it,” Arnie answered.

  Hanes explained that he had previously asked Arnie to show him the tape with sound but Arnie refused.

  “When you disclosed the tape to the state, did you disclose it had sound?” the judge wanted to know.

  “Are you posing this question as a discovery violation?” Arnie answered. “This is my client’s video. They made no representation [about what was on it] whatsoever.”

  The state’s position was that the tape has an entirely different context when viewed with sound. Arnie, of course, disagreed.

  Tap-dancing, but growing more and more flustered by the moment, Arnie told the judge that since the voices on the tape were hearsay, it was evidence he had not introduced.

  Sitting in a corner of the courtroom, as he had throughout the trial, Glenn’s lawyer Peter Catania looked aggravated. His jaw was tight and he looked warily at Arnie. He, too, intended to introduce the video to show Grady’s brutality at Glenn’s trial.

  “If the tape is introduced by the defense, it suggests a particular inference that the state has an opportunity to rebut,” Arnie explained weakly.

  Fuente didn’t agree. He agreed to view the tape at a sidebar before ruling.

  “Is this with or without the sound?” Arnie questioned as the tape was run.

  His question was answered a second later. There was laughter on the tape.

  “Break the hold,” somebody said.

  “Push harder,” said another.

  Fuente watched it until the wrestling match ended.

  “There’s no question. Viewing the tape [with sound] depicts a scene not of violence but of a family playing around,” said the judge from the bench. “They [the state] don’t have to object to something before they rebut it. I see it as something other than an act of violence.”

  It was a cold rebuke of Arnie and his position. But before allowing the tape into evidence, Judge Fuente wanted to know how Hanes received it.

  “I got it from Mr. Fred Rosen,” Hanes responded. “He’s writing a book on the case.”

  The courtroom went silent. Arnie looked back at me. Teresa Stiles’s gaze threw daggers into my skin.

  I stood up.

  “I see Mr. Rosen standing. Perhaps he has something—”

  “Your Honor,” Levine cut in, looking back at me with a worried expression. “We are satisfied that Mr. Rosen was not acting as an, uh, agent of the prosecution.”

  He would not argue any further about the tape being allowed in as evidence. And because of that, he sidetracked my explanation of how I’d gotten the tape.

  The judge ordered the videotape recorder set up and the jury brought in to view the tape. And then I
saw Arnie Levine.

  The grin and the jaunty attitude had vanished. In its place was a skull bearing down on me with flashing, sharp, white teeth. I shifted my tape recorder, which was sitting on the railing, and made sure it was turned on.

  When he got to the railing, Arnie leaned down, his face a few inches from mine. I could feel his breath.

  “Where’d you get that tape with audio?” he hissed through clenched teeth.

  “From you,” I replied calmly.

  “Fucker!” Arnie hissed. “You had the audacity to make that available to the state?”

  “How dare you, sir, have the audacity to try to show this court and the media a tape without sound?”

  “You fucker, you fucker—”

  “Keep talking,” I urged him on. I pushed my tape recorder closer but Arnie didn’t notice. As the jury was being seated, he kept cursing me.

  Hanes and the bailiff came over.

  Hanes spied my tape recorder.

  “Arnie, you’re on record. He’s taping.”

  “You fucker.…” The bailiff led him away. James Martinez the AP reporter who had witnessed the whole thing was madly writing in his notebook.

  In the media room, the reporters were scrambling. I’d thrown them a curve and they had to figure out how to play it.

  I took a seat in the corner and watched the reporters talking to each other, pressing the record buttons on their VCRs and taking notes as inside the courtroom, the tape with sound, was finally played for the jury.

  “Why’d you turn it over?” one reporter asked, with more than a little hostility in her voice.

  “What was I supposed to do?” I responded. “It wasn’t given to me from an anonymous source. The jury has the right to hear all the evidence.”

  Some of the others shouted questions at me.

  Suddenly, I was no longer one of their own; I was part of the story.

  During the afternoon session, the expert witnesses finished their testimony. Then Levine called Wayne Murray.

  Obese and bearded, sporting a big silver belt buckle, Murray took the stand.

  “I saw Grady frequently at the club,” he replied to one of Arnie’s questions.

  It seemed that, in addition to Showtown, Grady frequented the bar at the International Showman’s Club, also in Gibsontown. Murray, who recorded bally come-ons that carnies played from the platform while on the road, frequented the Showman’s Club as well.