04.Die.My.Love.2007 (44 page)

328 / Kathryn Casey

“Human beings make mistakes, and we’re all human beings,” Janus said. “The witnesses are human beings.”

Always he returned to the center of his case: “You’ve heard, as I told you in the opening statement, the name Tina Rountree, Tina Rountree, Tina Rountree . . . The evidence is replete with Tina Rountree’s name.”

If Piper had been in disguise, Janus asked, why wouldn’t she have traveled as a stranger instead of a person they could trace directly back to her? The identifications, he said, were faulty, because police didn’t show a spread of photos of women Piper’s age, only one photo, hers. Witnesses had pegged the weight of the woman they’d seen as anywhere from 125 to 140 pounds, when at the time Piper weighed only 104. Her height was five-four, but Benestante had estimated the woman he’d seen was as tall as fi ve-nine.

Did the jury believe that Marty McVey would fl y into Richmond and get on the stand and lie? McVey was an attorney, and he knew he could be charged with perjury and, if convicted, lose his law license.

“Piper Rountree didn’t get on the stand and say, ‘I think Tina did it,’ ” said Janus. “That name comes up in these documents that are in evidence.”

Janus went through the court’s charge to the jurors, argu-ing that Kizer and the other prosecutors hadn’t proved their case. “There is no burden on the defendant to produce any evidence,” Janus said, asking the jurors if they’d heard any of the witnesses say, “I saw Piper Rountree, that defendant, in Fred Jablin’s neighborhood, in his yard, on Saturday the thirtieth of October, 2004.”

“If one single one of you doesn’t think the commonwealth has sustained its burden beyond a reasonable doubt, I urge you, on behalf of the defendant, Piper Rountree, to have convictions and not just go along . . . I ask you to retire and come back, following the law, to find this defendant not guilty.”

* * *

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As the state has the heavier burden throughout the trial, they are allowed to split their time in the closing statement, to sandwich the defense. Kizer had chosen to do that, and now Duncan Reid took over. Throughout the prosecutor’s office, Reid was known to be an exceptional narrative speaker, one who could crystallize for a jury the essential elements of a case.

First Reid restated what they knew from the cell phone bills: Yes, he said, they did know that Piper had been the one at the Sportsman’s gun range. How? Because just minutes before, she’d called 411 on her cell phone to get the gun range’s phone number. And at the Sportsman’s, there was no conflicting testimony, the woman who’d practiced brought her own .38.

Yes, Reid admitted, some of the identifi cations were off by height and weight, but, he said, the witnesses were human beings and not computers. They recognized Piper as the woman they saw, and that was all that mattered. How in the world, he asked, could so many who said they saw her be wrong? How in the world could so many who said they’d heard her voice on the cell phone be wrong? Could Mr. Janus explain that?

On the stand, Piper had testified that she’d talked with her children that Friday, but she said that she’d used Tina’s telephone. Tina’s cell phone rec ords were in evidence, and Reid suggested the jurors look through them to see if they could find Piper’s calls to the children in Richmond. “You’re not going to find a single phone call from Tina’s cell phone into the 804 area code,” he said.

On the stand, he said, Piper Rountree had told one lie after another, “spun and spun and spun like a car out of control.”

The crime that ended in Fred Jablin’s murder, he said, began when Piper deceived herself by thinking, “I can do it, I can do it and not get caught,” Reid said. “She deceived herself by thinking . . . the kids are going to be better off 330 / Kathryn Casey

with me than they are with him. They won’t miss their daddy.”

Then, Reid used the bit of evidence he’d elicited during the trial, that during the camping trip Piper, a cell-phone-aholic, hadn’t made a single phone call. Why? “She had a grand time,” he said. “She was enjoying those kids.”

On Monday, when she had to return them to Fred, Reid said, her heart sank, and she knew she had to get them back.

How? Get rid of Fred.

Reid then recounted in chronological order the events that led to the murder: from buying the wigs on October 21, to trying to purchase the airline ticket on October 25, to practicing at the gun ranges on October 26 and 27.

During an emotional moment in his closing, Reid showed the jurors a recent photo of Fred with the three children, all smiling and happy. “This is the sort of family we all hope to have, the sort of family he had, the sort of family she wanted.”

On the Friday eve ning before the murder, Piper went to sleep, her children went to sleep, and Fred went to sleep. “At four-thirty Saturday morning she checked her voice mail, summoned her courage, got her gun, went out into the night, drove down the road she knew so well, went through the neighborhood she used to live in. Her children slept. And Fred slept.

“She parked her car, got out, and stepped out into the night.

Took a position. Her children slept,” Reid said, in a hushed, dramatic tone. “Fred got up, put on his slippers, went downstairs, started the coffee, went outside, walked down the driveway”—here, Reid’s voice sped up, tight and tinged with the horror of that morning. Fred “saw her, turned, ran, got shot in the back, one, two, three bullets, lay, fell, dead, under the basketball court that his children played at. She ran away into the night, and her children slept.

“The police came and found Fred early in the morning.

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Then the police went into the house, awoke the children to the nightmare that their own mother had created. Jocelyn, Paxton, and Callyn lost their father that day, all because she wanted to be with them.

“A murder in the first degree, willful, deliberated, premeditated murder of Fredric Mark Jablin.”

The two alternates were then dismissed, the twelve remaining jurors left the courtroom in single file to deliberate, and the lawyers left to find a place to have a quiet lunch. The courtroom emptied, and many of those who’d come simply as spectators went home to spend the rest of the day with their families, perhaps feeling lucky that they were still together, whole.

No one could have predicted how long the jury would be out. It could have been minutes, hours, days, or even weeks.

But the jurors went for lunch, and then, less than an hour after their deliberations began, at 2:45 that afternoon, word circulated through the Henrico County Courthouse that the Rountree jury had reached a verdict.

It had all happened so quickly that Piper’s mother and friends had not returned to the courtroom in time to hear the verdict. As the judge read, Piper Rountree rested her head on her hands and sobbed. The jury had found her guilty on both charges: first degree murder and the use of a fi rearm during the commission of a crime.

The judge asked the clerk to poll the jury, and she did, calling out each juror’s name. “Is this your verdict?” she asked.

“Yes,” each answered.

Through it all, Piper cried.

The jury’s work hadn’t ended. Now they were charged with one more task: to make a sentencing recommendation to the judge.

They waited briefly for all the witnesses to arrive, and the 332 / Kathryn Casey

first to testify in the punishment phase was Betty Rountree, Piper’s mother. She talked of Piper the baby of the family, whose father had suffered a massive stroke at forty-eight, one that devastated Piper. “He was really lost in this world,”

Betty said. Yet, she stressed that Piper had never given her mother problems. She’d been a good daughter, a bright child, and an excellent student who’d loved to read. And she was an artist who painted watercolors.

“Her work is just beautiful,” she said.

On the stand, Betty Rountree looked tired and defeated as she told the jurors how devoted Piper was to her children.

“Her whole life was the children,” she said. “Taking them places, reading to them. And the children were good children.”

Janus used Betty to bring into evidence photos of Piper with the children, during happy times. One was of Paxton hugging his mother, another was with Callie, when she was a baby, and Piper was kissing her toes. In another photo, Jocelyn had her head on Piper’s shoulder.

“Is there any question in your mind that Piper Rountree loved those children?” Janus asked.

“Oh no,” Betty said. “I don’t think there’s any question in anyone’s mind that knew Piper or knew the children. She was . . . she was just one of the best mothers that you could imagine.”

Then Betty recounted a night she’d stayed with Piper and the children. They’d all gone to bed in their individual beds, but in the morning she’d found all three children had slipped into Piper’s bed during the night. That was how Betty Rountree found her daughter and three grandchildren, all asleep together, in each other’s arms. “It was the most peaceful thing I’ve ever seen.”

When Wade Kizer took over, he used Betty to illustrate how supportive Fred had been of Piper, not only sending her to law school after they married, but moving to San DIE, MY LOVE / 333

Antonio and commuting three hours so they could live there.

“Ma’am, it was devastating for Piper to have her father taken away [after the stroke]?” Kizer asked.

“Absolutely,” she responded.

“But he was taken away by a medical condition . . . and she had the opportunity to see him until she was approximately thirty- five years old?”

“Yes,” Piper’s mother admitted.

With that Loni Gosnell took the stand in what would be the strangest testimony of the trial. Throughout, Loni sobbed, describing Piper as a wonderful mother, a Brownie leader and an art teacher.

“She’s wonderful,” Loni said. “She’s my best friend.”

Then, suddenly, for seemingly no reason, she turned to the jury, angry. “Look at me when I’m talking to you,” Loni ordered. “. . . They’re not looking at me!”

The judge admonished her, asking her not to talk directly to the jury.

When Duncan Reid took over, he asked Gosnell if it were true that she’d visited Piper six or seven times while she’d been in jail. Gosnell said yes, she had.

“Did you attend Fred Jablin’s funeral?” he asked.

“No, I did not. I didn’t know about it, honestly.”

“Have you visited his grave?”

“No, I have not.”

The prosecutors put on the stand only one witness, Michael Jablin. He talked of the Fred he’d known, his brother and his friend. And he described the horror of that weekend, when he and his wife had driven to Richmond to pick up Jocelyn, Paxton, and Callie.

“They’re all seeing therapists now,” he said, giving an inkling of the damage the divorce and murder had done.

When he’d come for them, they’d had to move quickly, 334 / Kathryn Casey

and the children were forced to leave behind not only their home, their friends and neighbors, but even their clothes and toys. “It’s been very traumatic for them,” he said, wiping away a tear. “It’s not an easy experience when you lose your father, and you have to move very quickly, and you can’t go back to your own home . . .

“Well, Jocelyn, every night almost, she sits in her room and she cries because she misses her father so badly. It’s been very hard to explain what happened. You know, when her father was murdered, you know when you know who it was, I said to her, we have to find the facts out first . . . she worried about my wife and myself, if someone would murder us . . . I dread going back now with my wife and having to tell them this is what the outcome is . . . How do I explain to young children that their mother killed their father?

They’ve lost both parents now . . . How does anybody explain something like that?”

Michael Jablin said that he’d asked Paxton and Callie to write their mother, but neither wanted to. “These children are very close . . . they don’t want to talk about what’s happened. We have therapists, psychiatrists working with them, to try to help them understand,” he said. “This is a diffi cult process. It’s going to take years, and into their whole life to understand what happened here.”

After more thought, Michael added: “It’s hard for me to understand why a mother would do this to her children.”

There were more photos of Fred and the children, happy days when they played basketball and at a party Fred had thrown for Paxton, depicted in a photo of Paxton blowing out the candles on his birthday cake.

“Mr. Jablin, don’t you think the children are going to miss their mother?” Janus asked on cross.

“There’s no question. They’re going to miss both parents.”

“Jocelyn came to visit her mother, after Christmas, right?”

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“Correct,” he said, later adding that on the advice of a grief counselor he had photos of both parents with the children displayed in their home. As to the money, Fred’s estate and the insurance money, he said that had all been put into a trust fund for the children.

Finally, in what would be the prosecutors’ fi nal argument, Owen Ashman took over the courtroom. From the start, she pushed the jury to give Piper the maximum, life in prison.

Fred, she said, was a teacher and a devoted father. He’d been killed outside his own home, in his slippers. “Left there to be found by neighbors, perhaps his children, who were sleeping in the house.

“Think of the three children,” she pleaded. “Think of how these three children must ache every single time they’re asked normal daily questions by other children, such as, are your parents coming to this event? . . . Every single Halloween. He was killed the day before Halloween . . . a children’s holiday, they’ll think of their dad.

“You heard their mother was devastated about losing her father for medical reasons, yet Piper, the same child who was devastated . . . has taken her own children’s father from them. This is not a good loving mother. No good loving mother would do this to her children.”

Then Ashman’s voice took on a hard edge. Piper Rountree is “clever. She’s sneaky. She’s selfish. She’s dangerous.