A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  “Did you tell him that you would help him with his education?”

  “He was told by Sergeant Brimmer that there were programs he might get into … we would try to make a request … if it was possible. That’s all.”

  Scornful, Tait asked, “Did you tell him to trust you?”

  “No. I didn’t use the words ‘Trust me.’ He used the word that he trusted me.”

  The tapes that Tuffy Pleasant and his attorneys now wished to recant played to a hushed courtroom. This was powerful direct evidence, the sound of Tuffy’s voice speaking of the coach he had once revered. “We were tight. In my book, he was Number One…I would do anything for the man, just not to see him hurt.”

  Tuffy’s voice detailed the last moments of Morris Blankenbaker, and then the last moments of the man who had planned both murders. These tapes that had long since become familiar to the attorneys and the detectives were riveting and horrifying to the gallery. The jurors’ faces remained unreadable.

  “Everything was his idea.” Tuffy Pleasant’s voice cracked.

  “Mr. Moore had this plan laid out, right?” Vern Henderson asked.

  “Yes, he had it all laid out. To the bone. To the bone.”

  “How do you feel?” Vern Henderson’s voice asked, as the second tape came to an end.

  “I don’t,” Tuffy said stoically. “Because I really just did it for him.”

  “What else?”

  “I was under the influence of him all the time, you know.” Tuffy said wearily. “I was on his mind track. I wasn’t on mine.”

  As a defense, would it have flown? Murder by brainwashing? Mind control? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it might be too late now. Adam Moore and Chris Tait had gone with a straight “Our client is innocent” defense.

  Now, Adam Moore leaped to his feet and asked for a dismissal of the murder charges in the death of Gabby Moore, —or, at the very least, a reduction to manslaughter.

  “The facts before the court clearly proclaim the involvement of Gabby Moore as the prime mover behind this whole sordid mess, this whole sickening sequence. He’s the grand artificer about everything that we’ve heard in court. He brought it all about. There isn’t a scintilla of evidence that Angelo Pleasant intended the death of that man, not a bit, not a scrap, not a tidbit, nothing,”

  Chris Tait argued that Gabby Moore had never intended to die, and that the defense believed that Tuffy never intended to administer a fatal wound.

  “He was supposed to live. That’s why the telephone was off the hook, so that Mr. Moore could crawl across the floor with the bullet wound in his shoulder and call for help. We know that he wanted to live because it was with the bullet wound, the attack on his person, that he hoped to convince Jerilee that he was innocent of his prior involvement … He was supposed to live. He wanted very much to live. He wanted to get Jerilee back … [Even] taking it in the light most favorable to the state, it’s got to be by some magical, mysterious process that we turn it into evidence of premeditation. It isn’t by any logical process that any of us are normally acquainted with. It’s by some other process that I will never understand as long as I live. That’s not premeditation.”

  Ahh, but it was.

  And Jeff Sullivan had the evidence in the defendant’s own words. Tuffy Pleasant had been afraid of the power Gabby Moore held over him.

  “It seems to me,” Sullivan began, “there are a number of logical inferences from the evidence that indicate that Glynn Moore was killed premeditatively and Angelo Pleasant intended his death …”

  “Glynn Moore contacted Angelo on Christmas Eve. Angelo came up there and he threatened him. He threatened him. He said, ‘Angelo, go get that gun and shoot me or I’m going to turn you in for the death of Morris Blankenbaker.’ So he went and got that gun. I think his exact words were, ‘I will put your neck on the chopping block if you don’t do what I say.’”

  Sullivan pointed out that the defendant was supposed to shoot Moore high in the left shoulder. “He also told the police that the shot came from six or seven feet away. I submit, Your Honor, that Exhibit fourteen shows the bullet hole of entry in the body of Glynn Moore not high on the left shoulder but seven or eight inches below the left shoulder. The testimony of Dr. Muzzall is clear— from twelve inches or less.”

  VERN HENDERSON: Well, this is the plan?

  TUFFY: Well, it wasn’t a plan. I just did it.

  VERN HENDERSON: Now, you did this because he had you up against the wall, or did you do this because this was mainly a plan he had?

  TUFFY: I really did it because he had me up against a wall. I really believed he had me.

  “Angelo realized,” Sullivan said firmly, “that if he didn’t eliminate Mr. Moore he was going to be able to use this threat of exposing him for the death of Morris Blankenbaker, and he would keep it over him for the rest of his life. And he adopted some of Mr. Moore’s philosophy: ‘If you got a problem, eliminate the problem, ‘ and he eliminated him. As soon as he shot him, did he try and help this man that he loved so much? No, he didn’t help him. He ran.”

  Jeff Sullivan submitted that the evidence of premeditation was in place to support the first-degree murder charges.

  The prosecution rested.

  At nine the next morning, Judge Loy ruled that he would not reduce the charge against the defendant in Gabby Moore’s death.

  Coydell Pleasant began the defense case. She was in an untenable position. If she stood up for her son Angelo (Tuffy), she endangered Anthony. And vice versa. She testified that Anthony had only visited Angelo once in jail, and he said he was “nervous” after Angelo was arrested.

  She said she and other family members had encouraged Angelo to tell the police everything.

  In tears, Coydell Pleasant said that Angelo had told her about Anthony during one of her visits to the Yakima County Jail. “He told me, ‘Mom, it’s going to hurt you, but Daddy raised us up to tell the truth.’ “

  It was almost as if Coydell believed that if two of her sons shared the guilt of the murders, each would pay only half the penalty. Her testimony was clearly a desperate— and heartbreaking— attempt to protect both Tuffy and Anthony. In the end, her words had little impact.

  It was Tuffy Pleasant who would be the main defense witness. Handsome, with a broad grin that seemed completely without guile. Tuffy proved at times to be a garrulous, even charming witness, as he recalled his rise to fame under Gabby Moore’s tutelage and his glory days. Despite the fact that he had been in jail for six months, he was still in peak condition. If he had been brought down by the long months of waiting for trial, he did not betray it. It was almost as if Tuffy Pleasant believed he were going to walk away from the courtroom a free man.

  To do so, of course, he would have to implicate his own brother and his own best friend.

  Adam Moore clearly wanted the jurors to get to know his client as a person, rather than as the defendant in a double murder case. Tuffy obliged by recalling the high points of his life. “My senior year I took second in state. Coming up my sophomore year and my junior year, I was a two-time state champion in freestyle wrestling.”

  “In what weight class, Angelo?”

  “My sophomore year, it was one hundred thirty eight and two pounds on would be one hundred forty. As a senior, I wrestled at one hundred fifty eight pounds.”

  “Would you say that the height of your athletic career [was] going to Japan?”

  “Japan and Hawaii, yes.”

  “And you fellows competed for the honor of being on that team to represent Washington?”

  “Yes— the best in the state.”

  After Tuffy had established his commitment to sports, Moore asked him about Gabby.

  “Now, how did your relationship with Talmadge Glynn Moore develop during your high school years? You have said that he recruited you as a small boy from junior high school and he developed you into a wrestler good enough to go to Hawaii and Tokyo. How did your relationship with the man grow— if it did grow du
ring this time?”

  “I feel that it was a tight relationship.”

  “‘Tight’? Was that the word? What do you mean by that?”

  “By ‘tight’ I mean that it went a little further than just teacher and student or coach and student. I could visit him and we visited as friends.”

  Tuffy likened Gabby to a father-a strict father figure who demanded that his athletes, including Tuffy, stuck to spartan training rules. He said that Gabby had continued to oversee his wrestling progress even when he went off to Columbia Basin College.

  Moore asked about Tuffy’s children with Rene Sandon.

  “We have two.” Tuffy smiled.

  “Names and ages?”

  “Reneshia Naomi Pleasant* is four years old … Melenae Tonyia Pleasant* is two months old.”

  The dark shadow of two murders lingered at the edge of the courtroom as Moore asked questions that were easy to answer. Slowly, he moved into Tuffy’s relationship with his brother Anthony. This too Tuffy characterized as “tight.” He could not say how his younger brother felt about him.

  The logic of Moore’s question was emerging. Tuffy was the older, self-sacrificing brother. Anthony was heedless and greedy.

  “We went out together quite a few times. But whenever he needed a car, he would always come and ask for mine, or else my older brother— but usually it would be mine. I would let him have it.”

  “You would let him use your car?”

  “Yes, I would cancel my night just so he could have fun on his night because I felt there’s always time for me to do my thing, so he can go on and do his thing.”

  “Did you ever talk to him the way Mr. Moore was talking to you about direction in life and motivation and that kind of stuff?”

  “Yes. Yes. I always tried to steer him forward and I felt he could be better than me and his older brother and our cousins, you see, because I felt that he had a lot better potential.”

  “Did you ever talk to Mr. Moore about Anthony in this vein?”

  “Yes, and we felt the same, that he could be the best of all of us if he just put his mind to it, and really strive for it and work for it.”

  “If he just put his mind to it?”

  “If he just put his mind to it.”

  “But he didn’t stay in the program, did he?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “He strayed from the path that you followed, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Did he keep the training rules?”

  “No, he didn’t … I just tried to help him out. I said that’s not really the way to do it, and I tried to give him explanations why not…I never held nothing against him.”

  Was it possible that Adam Moore had gone a bit too far? Some gallery watchers rolled their eyes, as if a chorus of Salvation Army singers were about to emerge and say, “Amen, brother.” Tuffy was being painted with a very, very broad brush of goodness.

  Kenny Marino, Tuffy’s longtime best friend, whom he had also fingered as a murderer, was the next subject discussed by the witness. Moore asked about how close Tuffy and Kenny had been after they were in college.

  “Were you tight then? Were you close?”

  “Yes, I would say we were very close. I took him in as another brother; I loved him just as much.”

  “You had accepted Mr. Moore as kind of a second father and Mr. Marino as a substitute brother?”

  “As another brother,” Tuffy corrected.

  But Moore elicited testimony that Kenny Marino had dropped out of school and seemed to Tuffy to have no goals in life.

  Once Anthony’s and Kenny’s characters were found lacking by Tuffy as he sat on the stand, Moore moved on to the disintegration of Gabby Moore’s ethics and values. There was no question at all of the defense strategy. They were attempting to let all blame slide off Tuffy Pleasant’s broad shoulders.

  It was a plan, but was the defense underestimating the jurors’ intelligence? Jeff Sullivan had been mightily impressed with this jury. He studied them, wondering as always what they were thinking, and realizing as always that he would not have a definitive answer to that until they came back with a verdict.

  Tuffy was telling them now about his shock at finding Gabby Moore “on the skids” in the autumn of 1975, of how he had tried to help him by putting in a driveway for him and helping to coach the high school wrestling team. This testimony sounded sincere. There seemed to be little question that Tuffy Pleasant had cared about Gabby Moore, that he had been slowly drawn into Gabby’s madness.

  “He was telling me that they [he and Jerilee] had gotten a divorce. He started telling me about the good times they had, and that she had left him and went back to stay with her former husband— that he had hoped she would make up her mind pretty soon. Maybe in a couple of weeks, she would make up her mind and she would be back with him.”

  “Was he optimistic that she might come back to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he was planning to sell the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because she left him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would it be a fair statement that he was unsure whether she was going to come back or not?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t feel I could answer that.”

  “You don’t know what was in the man’s head at that time?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Did you notice a change in him between Labor Day and Thanksgiving?”

  “Yes. He was changed. He wasn’t like Mr. Moore, the one I used to know, and I could hardly ever talk to him unless he was drinking. Usually what was on his mind was Jerilee, and he always would talk about Jerilee …”

  This jury of Seattleites had never heard of either Gabby Moore or Morris Blankenbaker before the trial. Skillfully, Adam Moore sketched in all the connections between Gabby and Morris and Tuffy and Morris and Gabby. Tuffy said he had met Morris years before when Morris was the lifeguard at the Washington Pool. He had talked to him there and known him through the years at wrestling practice. Tuffy acknowledged that relations between Morris and Gabby had not been good.

  “Mainly it was Moore toward him [Morris], wasn’t it?”

  “I felt it was, yes.”

  “Now, Moore started talking about Blankenbaker being in the way and that sort of thing. Did he talk about actually killing him?”

  “Well, he talked about a problem, see, and that Morris was presenting a problem to him at the time. And so then he started talking about eliminating the problem.”

  Apparently, Tuffy had forgotten that Jeff Sullivan had used that “eliminating the problem” quote from his taped confession the day before when the prosecutor was successful in keeping first-degree murder charges in force against Tuffy.

  “Did you know what he meant by that?” Adam Moore asked, unruffled.

  “No,” Tuffy answered. “Not until later. I was still trying to understand where he was coming from as a matter of speech.”

  “You didn’t understand he meant having him killed?”

  “Eventually, that’s what he meant.”

  “What was your position on that?”

  “Well, my position was I felt that he should forget about it-because he was an older man … Eventually he could forget about the situation and latch on to another lady, form another relationship with another party.”

  “Did you tell him that?”

  “Yes, I did. He said all he wanted was Jerilee. That’s all that was on his mind.”

  Tuffy described the impasse he and his former coach had come to in late October. Gabby drank and talked about Jerilee. “He had him a few glasses down and he started talking about Jerilee. And I told him he should just try to forget about the woman— like I was repeating myself also. And then he started getting down. He would break out his pictures-”

  “Pictures?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was this the album Sergeant Brimmer was talking about? There were two albums found in the bedro
om there. Is that what he meant by pictures?”

  “Yes, and then he would play some music that he would say he and Jerilee had a good time to. It stood out in his memory and he played the music over and over.”

  “What else happened this particular night?”

  “Then he started talking about Morris. Then he came out and he finally told me-he was finally to that point to have Morris eliminated.”

  The facts had not changed from the statement Tuffy had given to Vern Henderson, the facts the jury had heard on the tape. It was up to Adam Moore now to work his rhetorical magic and turn his client, the defendant, into the hero of this American tragedy instead of the shooter.

  It would be a gargantuan task even for the best criminal defense lawyer in Yakima County.

  But that would wait until the morning. It was five P.M., and Judge Loy was strict about letting the jurors go home at a reasonable time. The trial was in high gear though, and he announced that he would begin court a half hour earlier in the morning.

  Tuffy Pleasant was back on the stand the next day. Adam Moore asked him to relate the events of one Sunday in the first part of November— a few weeks before Morris Blankenbaker’s murder.

  “How long were you at his [Moore’s] house that day?”

  “About a couple of hours— two hours.”

  “Okay. Just tell the jury about everything that you remember about that two hours, will you?”

  “I got there and Mr. Moore was drinking. He asked me when I stepped through the door, ‘Why don’t you go ahead and pour yourself a drink?’ So I went ahead and poured myself a shot or two. Then he watched TV and he turned the TV down and then he started talking.”

  “And he started talking about Jerilee again. And I was just listening, you know. I wasn’t going to tell him too much. I was already trying to talk to him. I was just waiting until he finished because he just continually kept talking and then you kind of interrupt him. I noticed at the time I interrupted him he would get mad and jump right back at me and say, ‘Well, I’m talking. Just wait until I’m through talking and then you can give me your response.’ But then he kept carrying on and he finally said, ‘Well, I can’t find nobody to do it.’ And then he asked me if I would do it. I told him, ‘No,’ I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t even think about doing it. I felt that he was a grown man, and I said, ‘You are a grown man and you are asking me to do this for you. Now, I would do a lot for you but shooting somebody— that’s something else.’ “