Joe Dillard - 02 - In Good Faith

by Scott Pratt

  A large crucifix, at least three feet in length, dominated the paneled wall opposite the front door. On the wall to my left was a print of da Vinci’s The Last Supper. But it was the large print on the far wall that caught my attention. It depicted an eyeball atop a pyramid. The all-seeing eye of providence.

  “Is she dead?” Marie sat down across from Fraley. The way she said it sounded almost hopeful. I watched her light a cigarette. Her teeth were the same color as her skin and as unruly as her hair.

  “No, ma’am,” Fraley said. “She’s fine. She’s down at my office. We picked her up last night at a motel in Johnson City.”

  Marie stared off towards the living room for a long moment. She looked like she’d gone into a coma without closing her eyes.

  “Ms. Davis, are you all right?” Fraley said.

  Smoke rose up in a spiral from the end of her cigarette. She had the slow mannerisms and defeated look of an addict. The house was dirty and poorly lit. The carpet in the den was stained and matted. The linoleum floor beneath my feet was sticky, and a sour, musty odor hung in the air. The sound of dogs barking and snarling suddenly came reverberating through the house from the backyard.

  “Jesus!” Fraley said as he rose from the table. “Are they loose?”

  “They’re penned up,” Marie said, “and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t use the Lord’s name in vain in my home.”

  Fraley stepped through the kitchen to a back door and opened it. The other two agents walked in, both looking a little pale.

  “Dobermans,” I heard one of them mutter. “I hate Dobermans. My neighbor had one when I was a kid and it damned near killed me.”

  “What can you tell us about Natasha?” Fraley said after he returned to his seat at the table.

  Her expression turned hard and she looked away. “I got nothing to say about Natasha,” she said.

  “Can you at least tell me why you won’t talk to us about her?” Fraley said.

  She blew out a lungful of smoke and turned back towards Fraley. The hand that held her cigarette had started to tremble.

  “I reckon you’ll find out soon enough,” she said.

  “What about your other daughter?” Fraley said. “What can you tell us about Alisha?”

  “Can’t say nothing about her either.”

  “Why not?” Fraley said. “Why won’t you tell us anything about your daughters?”

  “I’m gonna go in and sit in my chair,” she said. “Y’all got no idea what you’re up against.”

  She got up from the table and began to walk stiffly towards the den. When she reached the recliner, she sat down and picked up a remote control from the arm of the chair. She pointed it at the television and flipped it on. A televangelist wearing a bushy gray toupee was pointing back at her from his pulpit, warning her about the wages of sin.

  “Ms. Davis,” Fraley said, following her into the room. “This warrant says we can search your home, but you could make things easier on both of us. Do you know if there’s an ice pick anywhere in the house?”

  She responded by turning the volume up on the television.

  “Fine,” Fraley said. “We’ll do it the hard way.” He snatched the remote out of her hand and turned the television off. “Where’s Natasha’s room?” he said.

  “Right down the hall,” Marie said. “I don’t never go in there myself.”

  “Go check it out,” Fraley said to me. “You guys go ahead and get started.”

  I walked through the den and into the dim hallway. About ten feet down the hall on the left was a door, painted black. I reached for the doorknob, but hesitated, not wanting to go in the room alone. I could hear commotion coming from the kitchen as the agents began their search. I walked back to the edge of the den and waited for Fraley.

  “What’s wrong?” he said as he pushed past me into the hallway. “Scared of the dark?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “For some reason I feel like I’m about to walk through the gates of hell, and I think I’d like some company.”

  Fraley turned the knob and opened the door. It was pitch-black inside the room. Fraley started feeling along the wall for a light switch, found it, and flipped it on.

  I stepped inside and looked around. The room wasn’t much bigger than a prison cell, with a closet that ran the length of the wall to my right. At first glance, it looked like nothing special. I thought we’d find candles and pentagrams and inverted crosses. Instead, the room was just dirty, with clothing strewn all over the place.

  A mirror over a small dresser caught my eye. I stepped towards it. Scrawled on the mirror in what looked like blood were the words “ah Satan.” Beneath it was the phrase, “Hell is for children.”

  There was a stack of books on a table by the bed. Fraley picked up the book on the top, looked at the cover, then dropped it as though it burned him.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “The Satanic Bible,” he said. Fraley picked up another book and showed it to me, Helter Skelter. A third was The Art of Black Magic. “What kind of freak reads this shit?”

  “Did you see the print hanging in the den?” I said. “The one with the eye?”

  “Yeah. What about it?”

  “Do you know what that symbol is?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “It’s on the back of paper currency. It represents the all-seeing eye of providence. It may not mean anything, but all of our victims were shot or stabbed in the eye. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  “We’ll take it with us, along with the books and the mirror,” Fraley said. “Let’s finish up and get the hell out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

  Three hours later, Fraley and I stood inside a room in the TBI office that was used to monitor interrogations. Natasha had been moved from Fraley’s office to the interrogation room while we searched her house. Sam Boyer had been taken to the county jail in Jonesborough, while Levi Barnett was transported to the juvenile detention center in Johnson City. We could see Natasha on a video monitor, rocking slowly back and forth in her chair.

  The agents had removed the mirror from Natasha’s room and the print of the eye of providence from the den, and searched every inch of the house. We bagged the literature. We found some prescription drugs in a dresser upstairs in Marie’s bedroom, but we hadn’t found an ice pick or any shoes that matched the smaller footprints found near the tree where Norman Brockwell was found. Outside of the symbols, we had nothing concrete to tie Natasha to the murders. There was some circumstantial evidence—the fact that “ah Satan” was Natasha spelled backwards and the inverted-cross tattoo on her neck—but I still had no way of proving Natasha was at either of the crime scenes.

  “It looks like our only hope is if she confesses or if one of the others turns on her,” I said to Fraley.

  “She’s not going to confess,” Fraley said.“She wouldn’t say a damned word to me.”

  “Maybe you should take another crack at her,” I said.

  I sat down at the video monitor and watched while Fraley made another futile attempt to question Natasha. She refused to speak or acknowledge him in any way. She simply stared down at the table, unblinking, the hood of the robe pulled over her head. Fraley cajoled her and pleaded with her, then threatened her. Finally, he resorted to insults. He tried every tactic he knew, but he might as well have been talking to a flat rock. She didn’t even look at him.

  After nearly an hour of talking to himself, Fraley stood and walked out of the room. Natasha remained frozen.

  “What the hell are we going to do with her?” Fraley said, a look of defeat and disgust on his face.

  “We don’t have a choice,” I said. “We don’t have enough to hold her. We have to let her go.”

  Tuesday, October 14

  There was an outrage in the community I’d never encountered. Word quickly got out that arrests had been made. By the time Fraley’s agents took Sam Boyer to the county jail for booking, an angry mob had formed near the sally p
ort. I watched the report on the news that night as they chanted, “Baby killer,” at him and screamed insults. Some of them threw objects—the reporters said they were throwing baby rattles and teddy bears—as the agents took Boyer out of the van, covered him with their bodies to protect him, and shuffled him quickly into the jail.

  Everywhere I went, I was accosted by people I didn’t know. At the grocery store, at the post office, in the hallways at the courthouse, people would thank me for helping to finally arrest those who had been terrorizing the community. “Kill the bastards,” they would whisper. “Fry their asses.” They thirsted for blood, for vicarious satisfaction, and I was the designated henchman.

  I couldn’t help wondering how Boyer felt, and whether the mob mentality might work to our advantage somehow. The other suspect, Levi Barnett, was transported to the juvenile detention center and was spared the mob scene. Natasha was released, though she was under twenty-four-hour surveillance, leaving Boyer the focal point of the hatred of an entire community.

  We convened a special session of the county grand jury, and based on the evidence I presented, they indicted Boyer and Barnett for six counts of first-degree murder, five counts of especially aggravated kidnapping—one each for the Becks and Norman Brockwell—one count of felony theft for stealing the Becks’ van, and one count of burglary for breaking into the Brockwells’ home. I drafted the statutory notice that informed Boyer and his lawyers that the state was seeking the death penalty. I had plenty of evidence against the boys—Fraley and his companions had done an excellent job—but I was still uneasy about whether the arrest and search warrants would hold up once the defense lawyers found out about Alisha. I didn’t offer to present her as a witness in front of the grand jury; I simply referred to her as a confidential informant. She was still nowhere to be found.

  Since Levi Barnett was a juvenile, we couldn’t seek the death penalty against him. Tennessee’s death penalty statute was indiscriminate when it came to matters of race, creed, or religion, but it drew the line at killing children. In Tennessee, you had to be eighteen years old to vote, to buy cigarettes, and to get yourself killed by the state.

  Boyer was arraigned via satellite three days after his arrest and interrogation. Judge Ivan Glass appeared on a television screen at the jail and informed Boyer of the charges against him and his rights. He also appointed James T. Beaumont III to represent him, the same lawyer who had represented Billy Dockery a couple of months earlier.

  Levi Barnett was a little more complicated. Before we could get him into court to try him as an adult, we had to convince the juvenile court judge to transfer him to the jurisdiction of the adult criminal court. It wasn’t much more than a formality, but the judge was vacationing in Italy and couldn’t conduct the hearing for three weeks. We reached the judge by phone at his motel in Venice and asked permission to bring in a substitute judge, but true to form, he refused to give up his fifteen minutes of fame.

  I spent the next week fending off the media, organizing as much evidence as I could, and preparing for the William Trent trial. Despite the fact that both Fraley and I told Lee Mooney we believed Natasha Davis was directly involved in the Beck and Brockwell murders, the extra TBI agents had been ordered to return to their respective assignments around the state. That left Fraley shorthanded, and after a week of men staring at the house on Red Row and seeing nothing, the surveillance on Natasha had been discontinued.

  On Tuesday morning, the fourteenth of October, I got to the office at six and went back over my notes and strategy for the Trent trial. At eight, I looked up to see Lee Mooney standing in my doorway, sipping a cup of tea.

  “Are you ready for this?” Mooney asked.

  “As ready as I can be.”

  “Are you going to win?”

  “Who knows? Depends on the jury; you know that.”

  “Why haven’t you made a deal?”

  “Because the only deal Snodgrass will accept is a slap on the wrist. No jail time, expungement, no supervised probation. Hell, I’m surprised he didn’t ask for a public apology from the DA’s office.”

  “This is important, Joe. Don’t screw it up.”

  He turned and disappeared without saying another word, and I sat there wondering what would happen if my plan backfired and I lost the case. About fifteen minutes later, Cody Masters showed up, accompanied by our two star witnesses, Alice Dickson and Rosalie Harbin.

  Alice Dickson was an attractive, introverted nineteen-year-old who’d grown up in a small trailer that perched precariously on a Washington County hillside in the Lamar community. I’d visited the trailer and spoken to Alice’s aunt while preparing for the trial. Alice had been born to a teenager named Tara Dickson back in the late eighties. Her mother was neither willing nor able to care for an infant, and when Alice was three months old, she was wrapped in a blanket, put in a bushel basket, and left on Jeanine Taylor’s tiny front porch in the middle of the night. Jeanine was Tara’s older sister. No one had seen or heard from Tara since. When I asked about Alice’s father, Jeanine just shook her head. She had no idea who the father was.

  Jeanine already had two small children of her own. Her husband worked at a factory in Johnson City for just above the minimum wage, and Jeanine worked at a convenience store. They barely got by. When Alice was thirteen, Jeanine’s husband, a hard drinker named Rocky Taylor, began to molest her. Alice immediately told Jeanine, who refused to believe her. But within a week, the molestation escalated to rape. When Rocky, in a drunken stupor, followed Alice into the bathroom late one Friday night, Jeanine caught him in the act. She gave him a choice of hitting the road or going to jail. Rocky chose the road, leaving Jeanine to raise three children alone.

  The other girl, Rosalie Harbin, was nothing short of a hellion. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and flirty, and had been raised by her Mexican mother and marijuana-dealing father about two miles from where Alice grew up. She’d been in trouble for various petty offenses—mostly thefts—since she was twelve. By the time she turned eighteen, she’d added forgery to her growing repertoire of illegal skills.

  The girls had met on the school bus, and though they were polar opposites, they’d been friends since they were six years old. It was Rosalie who’d heard from one of her other friends about the unusual circumstances at William Trent’s pizza place, and it had been Rosalie who’d encouraged her friend Alice to go with her and apply for a job. Alice, who was desperately poor and barely over fifteen, had traded in her morals for the opportunity to make ten dollars an hour. Rosalie was the same age, but I got the impression that she would have done it for free.

  “Now, remember what I told you,” I said as we got up to leave for the courtroom. “Just tell your stories. When Snodgrass comes after you, stay calm. He’s going to insult you; he’s going to accuse you of being liars. Rosalie, he’s going to bring up every theft and forgery charge that the judge will let him get away with. His entire strategy is to make both of you look like you’re not credible witnesses, and that’s exactly what I want him to do.”

  I turned to Alice. Her strawberry-blond hair was shimmering; her blue eyes were clear. She’d worn a conservative, high-necked blue dress and looked like a young girl on her way to church. It was precisely the look I’d hoped for.

  “Are you ready for this?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Do you have it in your purse?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t mention it until I ask you about it. It won’t be until after Snodgrass cross-examines you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  By one thirty, we’d picked a jury, broken for lunch, and were ready to start the trial. There were three newspaper reporters and one television crew in the gallery. The only other people in the courtroom were William Trent’s wife and his mother. Cody Masters was sitting at the prosecution table next to me, while Trent, dressed in a dark blue suit and yellow tie, sat next to Joe Snodgrass at the defense table. Trent was a slight man
, around five feet, eight inches, and skinny, with receding sandy blond hair and expressionless brown eyes. He was chewing his fingernails as I walked into the room.

  The judge was Brooks Langley, a skin-headed, seventy-year-old retiree who was sitting in because both of the regular criminal court judges had accepted campaign contributions from William Trent. I’d dealt with Judge Langley through a couple of motion hearings and was impressed with both his knowledge of the legal issues and the way he ran his courtroom. I didn’t think Snodgrass would be able to get away with much grandstanding.

  The jury consisted of seven women and five men. All but one of the men had daughters, and all but two of the women were mothers. In picking the jury, I wanted to be sure I stacked it with as many women as possible. I intended to remind them what it was like to be fifteen.

  During the initial questioning of the potential jurors, Snodgrass had strongly hinted that his client was falsely accused by two conniving former employees who became angry when they were fired for poor work performance and insolence. He intimated that the girls were planning to file a civil suit if Trent was convicted. It was the first time I’d heard that allegation.

  The judge handed me the indictment, and I read it out loud to the jury. It charged William Trent with ten separate counts of sexual abuse by an authority figure. Mooney had framed the indictment so that I had to prove only five dates on which the sexual abuse occurred. On all five of those dates, both Alice Dickson and Rosalie Harbin claimed that they had “threesome” sex with Trent. I was impressed with the way Mooney did it, because it meant that each girl could corroborate what the other was saying on the witness stand.

  As soon as I finished reading the indictment, Judge Langley asked me whether I wanted to make an opening statement.

  “I’ll defer to Mr. Snodgrass,” I said.

  Surprised, Snodgrass grunted and stood up. He’d cleaned up a little for the show. His hair wasn’t greasy and his shirt wasn’t wrinkled, but he still reminded me of Jabba the Hutt. Snodgrass spent the next thirty minutes telling the jurors—in his uniquely bellicose way—what a wonderful human being his client was, and that a terrible miscarriage of justice was being perpetrated on Mr. Trent by an unreasonable, even cruel system. When he was finished, I walked over in front of the jury, spread my feet, clasped my hands behind my back, and looked them straight in the eye.