Karp wondered if Lewis had used makeup to enhance the bedraggled appearance or had simply told her client to avoid getting any sleep. The look certainly fit the stereotype of a "crazy woman."
Campbell glanced over at him, but her eyes filled with tears; she looked back down at a large sketch pad on which she was drawing with a pencil. But Lewis was watching him.
He'd expected her to be more flamboyant in dress, having seen her in action before; however, she looked like an assistant district attorney in her off-the-rack gray dress suit. She gave Karp a curt nod—the sort an antagonist might use before choosing a dueling pistol, then turned her back to him to say something to her client.
Karp turned in his seat to look at the spectator section of the court. Sitting directly behind the defense table were Liza and Benjamin Gupperstein. On the other side of Ben Gupperstein, but a world apart otherwise, was Charlie Campbell. After the Off the Hook Show, his ranking in the polls had fallen like the New Year's Eve globe at Times Square and he'd disappeared from public view for a while.
When he reappeared, he was back in the defense camp, apparently having worked out a deal. Publicly and frequently, he blamed himself "for not taking the psychiatrist's warning seriously enough." At the same time, Lewis stopped demanding that he be prosecuted for conspiracy to commit murder. His poll numbers had since stabilized, a trend Karp figured would continue as long as Charlie behaved.
The president of NOF and a phalanx of angry women sat in the row directly behind Charlie. A couple of token men sat near the president, too, but they had the look of worker drones attending to a queen bee.
Karp had heard from the court security chief that many of the spectators had shown up outside the building during the night and slept on the sidewalk to assure themselves a seat in the courtroom. "It's like a damn rock concert," the man had complained. Those who outfought the media for a seat were now eagerly waiting for the show to begin; several apparently even brought snacks.
The crowding in the courtroom prevented spectators and the press from "choosing sides" the way they often did when attending a trial—that is, sitting behind either the prosecution table or the defense table. He'd even seen people switch from one side to the other during the course of a trial as their opinions changed. This morning, however, they'd taken seats wherever they could find them, and he noticed that some of the women sitting on the prosecution side of the aisle looked uncomfortable. One in particular was shooting him dirty looks and mouthing something that he didn't care to translate.
The Jessica Campbell murder trial had become a national story. The Off the Hook Show had been the first to latch on to it, but it hadn't been the last. Every major network had done a piece along the lines of "Moms Who Kill," with special emphasis on the "growing phenomena" of postpartum depression as a cause of homicide.
Karp began to say something to Katz when there was a sudden commotion behind him. The woman who had been glaring at him and mouthing slurs apparently couldn't take it anymore. She stood up and tried to spit on him.
Fortunately for Karp—but not for a well-known television newscaster two rows in front of her—the lubricious projectile lacked sufficient velocity and trajectory. It struck the man in the forehead as he turned to see what the fuss was about. He screamed shrilly, as if her spit consisted of hydrochloric acid. The woman pointed at Karp and shouted. "Satan! Get thee gone! How dare you persecute a woman who hears and obeys the word of God. Who are you to judge her, except one of those accursed people who killed Jesus!"
Security guards rushed down the aisle and into the row to grab her. She kicked and screamed and tried to sit back down; the guards tugged from one direction and her friends held on in the other. All three women were eventually pulled from the courtroom and their seats filled with the next three in line.
"I'll never question the need for metal detectors at the front doors again," Kenny said in a low voice.
Karp chuckled. "All in a day's work." He'd been worried that the distractions would have an effect on his protégé, but Katz was handling the scene like a seasoned veteran.
Glancing at his legal pad, Karp recalled his discussion with Katz about how to begin the trial. "I'm just going to lay it out—simply, clearly. I'll leave the theatrics for the other side. If we let them make this a trial based on emotions, we'll lose."
"I hear what you're saying," Katz had responded, "but isn't that kind of tough? Every time I see a photograph of those kids' bodies and think about what they went through, I just want to snap that woman's neck."
"Precisely my point," Karp had replied. "You've looked at the evidence, and the evidence told you that Jessica Campbell knew what she was doing and deserves to be punished. So what makes you think the jury won't have the same reaction when they see what you've seen, heard what you've heard, and know what you know? This has got to be about the vicious, off-the-charts brutal acts of murder committed against these defenseless children by their caretaker-in-chief, and not about the defendant's mental defect."
Voices fell silent and everyone scrambled to their feet when the court clerk announced the arrival of New York Supreme Court Judge Timothy Dermondy. Unlike almost all other state supreme courts, the New York Supreme Court is not the highest appellate court in the state judicial system; instead, it is the actual trial court. This anomaly has a tendency to drive first-year law students to drink when they make the mistake of believing they have appellate precedent when they cite a decision by a New York Supreme Court judge.
Five foot ten, slim, and balding, Dermondy had graduated at the top of his class from Fordham Law School and then joined the New York DAO, where he served for many years before becoming a judge. At the time he had joined the staff, the DAO was headed by Francis Garrahy, and Karp wasn't even out of high school.
The Dermondy family had a long history of serving the citizens of Manhattan. His dad and uncles had been big-time brass with the NYPD, and Timothy had become Garrahy's top ADA, the eventual chief of the homicide bureau and one of the top trial lawyers ever to walk into a New York City courtroom. On the bench, he was considered by attorneys on both sides of the aisle to be fair-minded and even-handed; but he did not suffer well any ADA who was not prepared. Painstaking, thorough preparation was the bedrock of success. Karp considered himself fortunate to have been mentored by Dermondy, just as he was now tutoring Katz.
Dermondy left everybody standing while he looked out at them like a loving father whose unruly children were beginning to try his patience. "Now, good people," he said firmly. "I've been told by my clerk that there has already been an unseemly outburst. I must let you know right now that I won't tolerate another. You'll conduct yourselves in a manner both respectful and orderly, or you will be taken to The Tombs and left there to contemplate the error of your ways. This goes for lawyers, spectators, and the media. Am I clear?"
The crowd nodded as one. "All right then," the judge said, "you may take your seats."
Judge Dermondy asked that the jury be brought in and seated, and once they were in place he made a short speech about the history of the jury system in the United States. "It is a sacred duty," he warned the jurors. "And you must do nothing that abridges that duty, including talking to the media or discussing the case with anyone until I have given you leave to do so. Am I clear?"
This time it was the jurors' turn to nod. "Good," the judge said. "I'm sure we'll get along famously, and thank you for taking on this very important task." He looked at the prosecution team. "Are you ready with your opening statement?"
"Yes, your honor," Karp said, rising.
"Then let's have it, Mr. Karp."
Karp approached the podium, which was placed between and slightly ahead of the defense and prosecution tables, and put down his legal pad. He took a final look at what he'd written.
"On the morning of March 17, Jessica Campbell went to the below-street-level parking garage of her home on Central Park West to run a few errands. She got in the family's Volvo station wagon and left the
garage, driving south until she reached the Holland Tunnel, which she took to New Jersey. In Newark, Mrs. Campbell drove to the O'Hara's Hardware Store on London Road, where she purchased a large footlocker and a stainless steel combination padlock. She then drove 3.8 miles farther to Bucky's Sporting Goods, where she purchased an Old Timer hunting knife with a nine-inch blade. Any of these same items could have been bought much closer to home, but Jessica Campbell didn't want to be recognized. Why? Because she knew what she intended to use these items for."
On the morning of the murders, Karp told the jurors, Jessica Campbell rose from her bed, fixed her husband a large breakfast, "which he did not eat and left on the counter," and then waited for him to leave for a meeting. "A meeting, he told her, which might last well into the evening," he added.
Karp paused to emphasize his next point. "Not until after he left, and could ask no questions, did Mrs. Campbell then call the nanny, Rebecca, and tell her not to come to work that day. As Rebecca will testify, her boss said she was going to 'take care of the children herself.' Mrs. Campbell then proceeded to the main floor bathroom of the family brownstone and filled the tub with water.
"We will learn from the evidence that Jessica Campbell brought her children into the bathroom and placed them in the tub. But she wasn't there to bathe them, or play with them; she put them there in order to kill them." Karp walked over to the side of the prosecution table where he picked out a poster-sized photograph of the Campbell family fixed to a Styrofoam board. He crossed the floor and placed the photograph on an easel near the jury box, and went back to the podium.
"This was the Campbell family in January of this year," Karp continued. "That's Charlie Campbell on the left and Jessica Campbell on the right holding the infant, Benjamin, who was only a few weeks old; standing in front of them is seven-year-old Hillary and her four-year-old sister, Chelsea." Karp paused to let the jurors get a good look at the photograph before he resumed. "The Campbell children did not go easily. The evidence will show that it took several minutes to drown each child as they kicked, scratched, and fought with their mother, the defendant, to stay alive."
A sudden sob broke the stillness of the courtroom. All heads turned to the source of the sound, Jessica Campbell, and waited to see what she would do next. But she kept her head down and returned to drawing on her sketch pad.
"In fact, one of the children, Hillary, fought bravely. She scratched and even managed to bite her mother hard enough to leave a clear set of teeth marks on Jessica Campbell's arm. She struggled to stay alive so hard that when drowning failed to kill her, Jessica Campbell had to resort to Plan B, the hunting knife she purchased at Bucky's. You will hear testimony that she plunged that knife into her daughter's body at least six times, each time painful and brutal, until the life bled out of Hillary into the waters of that bathtub."
Karp looked down at his pad and then back to the jurors. "When the defendant accomplished the deed she'd planned so carefully, Jessica Campbell moved on to the next phase. She retrieved the footlocker and placed the bodies of her three children in it, dragged it through the house—we will show you a photograph in which you can see the scratches the footlocker caused on the hardwood floors—to the family's Volvo station wagon. The locker had to be heavy, about 150 pounds, but she managed to lift it up and into the car's cargo space in the back.
"After Mrs. Campbell's arrest, crime-scene technicians went over the entire house and discovered that everything was clean and in seemingly perfect order. In fact, we will learn from the evidence that the main floor bathroom was so clean that it was nearly impossible to get even one clear fingerprint. Imagine that—two adults, three children, and not a single fingerprint.... There was certainly no blood, and in fact, the bathroom was so spotless that it was difficult to imagine that it was the place where the defendant had ruthlessly snuffed out the lives of her three trusting children. The defendant, Jessica Campbell, had gone to great lengths to clean the scene of the murders, and she went to these lengths to hide what she had done, aware of the enormity of what had happened. As a further part of her premeditated plan to cover up the murders, Jessica Campbell drove the Volvo north to the little town of Staatsburg, a village on the Hudson River she'd known growing up, and rolled the car, containing the trunk with her children's bodies stuffed inside, into the river."
Over the next half hour, Karp outlined how "a unique and effective group of forensic investigators" had figured out how to find the car and what its contents had revealed. "It showed that this was no spur-of-the-moment decision. No bolt out of the blue," he said. "These murders were well-planned, well-executed crimes committed by a person who had plenty of time to consider the nature and consequences of what she was doing and who took elaborate, diabolical steps to avoid detection. Even months after she committed these crimes, she refused to tell anyone where the bodies of her children were hidden, not even to allow them to be brought home to be buried decently."
The courtroom was still, the loudest sound the soft crying of Liza Gupperstein. Karp used the moment to check his notecards and then strolled to the front of the jury box, his arms folded across his chest.
"You're going to hear a lot of talk about mental illness and psychological terms like 'postpartum depression' and 'psychosis.' The defense will be trying to tell you that Jessica Campbell was legally insane at the time of these crimes and therefore not responsible for her actions. I think we can all agree that acting purposefully and intentionally killing another human being, except in self-defense or in the defense of others, may be just plain crazy," Karp said. "At least in our everyday use of the word. But that's not how the law defines insanity. With the law, it's all about responsibility. And to determine if the defendant is responsible or not, the law asks you to hear and see the evidence and then answer two questions: Did the defendant know the nature and consequences of her actions? And did she know that it was wrong?"
Karp rocked on his heels as he looked at the jurors, making eye contact with several of them. "And when you have answered these questions, and have come to the inevitable conclusion that the defendant knew the nature and consequences of her acts and knew what she did was wrong, I will ask you, in the name of the People of the State of New York, to find the defendant, Jessica Campbell, guilty of the murder of baby Benjamin, guilty of the murder of his four-year-old sister, Chelsea, and guilty of the murder of seven-year-old Hillary."
Karp returned to his seat and stole a glance around the courtroom. Jessica sat furiously drawing on the sketch pad as if her art mattered more to her than the proceedings.
Charlie Campbell sat turned slightly away from his in-laws, who were ignoring his existence. Ben Gupperstein had his arm around his wife, who leaned her head against his chest, her eyes closed.
Linda Lewis rose from her seat, flipped through several pages on a legal pad she had on the table, and then walked to the lectern, where she stopped for a moment with her head down, as if listening to an inner voice.
"What if God was one of us?" she asked, then smiled. "Yes, I know, those are the words of a Joan Osborne song, but what if God really was one of us? In human form, walking around, talking to us, asking us ... no, telling us ... what He wanted us to do? How would we recognize Him? Or what if God simply spoke to us in our minds? How could we distinguish that from a mental illness?"
Lewis walked behind Jessica Campbell and rested her hands on the shoulders of her client. "And if we believed, we really and truly believed, that God was speaking to us, would we not listen? And if God, or what we believed to be God, told us that in order to save our children's souls, we would have to sacrifice them, would we do it?"
She shook her head. "Only if we were insane." She looked over at Karp and Katz. "The chief prosecutor just told you that murder is an act of insanity, and maybe it is, but there are different degrees of insanity. Shooting somebody over a drug deal or even raping and murdering a college coed, as heinous as those crimes might be, do not rise to the level of insanity of a good and carin
g mother taking the lives of her three children because she believes that's what God has ordered her to do."
Lewis kept her eyes on Karp. "It's easy for the prosecution to dismiss mental illness as a 'bad excuse.' But that sort of thinking belongs in the Dark Ages, when we used to throw mentally ill people into dungeons or burn them at the stake. Fortunately, right-thinking people today understand that mental illness is just that—an illness that can be treated. It is not something that the patient brought upon herself. And just as other serious illnesses can sometimes be cured, and the patient can return to a normal life, so can the mentally ill be cured and returned to a productive, normal life."
Lewis went into a "layman's explanation" of the role of chemicals in the brain and their effect on postpartum depression before addressing some of Karp's opening statement. "Why did Jessica drive to Newark to purchase the footlocker and other items?" she asked. "Yes, it was to avoid detection. But not for the reason the prosecution said. She wanted to make sure that no one could stop her from obeying God's commandments. Not the police, nor her husband, Charlie Campbell. You will learn that Charlie Campbell ignored a psychiatrist's very strongly worded advice against Jessica having more children and instead pressured her to conceive again because of his own selfish political motives."
Everyone turned to Charlie Campbell, who bravely lifted his chin for the press, a man ready to accept his punishment and throw himself on the court of public opinion. Lewis threw him a bone.
"Most of us don't really understand how the brain works," she said. "How could Charlie Campbell, who went to school to be an attorney, be expected to give credence to this warning when the district attorney's office, which deals with mentally ill people every day, still doesn't get it? If Charlie erred in his judgment, then surely the DA is erring in prosecuting Jessica Campbell for something she could not control, and that she cannot even remember." The courtroom stirred at the contention that Jessica had amnesia about the killings. This was new.
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