A Case of Redemption (30 page)

Boyle's direct testimony held no surprises. Kaplan's questions were more or less limited to “And what happened next?” but that was enough to get Boyle to tell the jury everything Kaplan wanted them to know.

She started with the crime scene.

With an actor's cadence, Boyle said, “The first thing that I noticed when I got to Roxanne's house was that there was no evidence of forced entry. That's very important because it usually means that the victim allowed the murderer entry into the home. In this case, you had a situation where Roxanne was killed between eleven p.m. and three or four in the morning, and in her bedroom. That told me that she not only knew her murderer but was likely intimate with him, because she allowed him not only into her home late at night but also into her bedroom.”

This made perfect sense, but it was also riddled with holes and assumptions. Contrary to Boyle's conclusions, the murderer could have tricked Roxanne into letting him in, pretending to be a neighbor or even the police. Or the murderer might have entered the apartment much earlier, held Roxanne hostage for the day, and forced her up to the bedroom hours later to kill her. But that's the thing with direct examination. You have no choice but to sit helplessly by while the other side makes its points, no matter how misleading, and wait until cross-examination to correct them. Of course, by then, most of the damage has already been done.

“Please tell the jury what you observed in Roxanne's bedroom, Detective Boyle?” Kaplan asked.

“Roxanne was lying facedown, beside her bed. Her white, silk comforter was completely soaked red with blood. The walls were also covered in blood. In my twenty-two years on the force, this was probably the most gruesome crime scene I'd ever seen.”

I would have bet twenty bucks that with the dead body of a famous pop star in front of him, Boyle hadn't spent time analyzing the fabric of Roxanne's comforter, and I'd have gone double or nothing that he didn't even know what fabric his own comforter was made out of. These were undoubtedly little verbal cues supplied by Kaplan to paint a more vivid picture of the crime scene. “Blood on her covers” just doesn't hit you like a “white, silk comforter that was completely soaked red with blood.”

Kaplan handed me the crime scene photos, the standard protocol before passing them on to the jury. I'd seen them dozens of times by now. So often, in fact, that I'd become inured to their shock value. But so much of a trial is theater, and I knew that the jurors would draw conclusions based on my reaction, and so I did my best to look horrified.

L.D. knew the drill, too. Showing no emotion would make him seem like a sociopath, but false emotion would cast him as a liar, which wasn't much better.

He looked stoically at the first picture, lingering on it for a few seconds, and he held that pose through the second. By the time he'd reached the third, however, he shed a tear, something he'd never done when we looked at them in private, not even the first time. He then pushed the stack back to me without looking at the rest, as if he couldn't bear to see another one. As far as I knew, L.D. had never done any acting outside of his videos, which hardly qualified, but this was an Academy Award performance.

I handed the photos back to Kaplan, expecting her immediately to pass them on to the jury. Unfortunately, she still had a little more lily gilding to do.

“I have to caution you in advance, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “I'm now going to distribute photographs of the crime scene, which include pictures of Roxanne shortly after she was murdered. I wish there was a way that you could fulfill your service without having to see the horror depicted in these photographs, so that you could all remember Roxanne as the beautiful young woman she was in life, and not the disfigurement of her death. I apologize in advance for having to give them to you, but it is very important that you see these pictures to fully understand the brutality of this crime.”

Not a word of Kaplan's little speech was true. There's nothing ADAs like better than showing juries gore, and juries don't have to see the victim lying in blood to understand that a murder occurred.

When they finally got hold of the photos, each juror seemingly
went through the same process. First they'd excitedly take them, the way you look forward to seeing the car accident that's caused all the traffic, but as soon as they'd made it to the second one, their expression changed abruptly, as if they'd just realized that this was a real person. A murdered woman. Then each juror stared right at L.D. with utter revulsion.

When the last of the jurors had performed this exercise, Kaplan finally broke the silence. “Detective Boyle, was there any evidentiary matter in Roxanne's bed?”

This settled a side bet between Nina and me. Nina thought Kaplan wouldn't address the pubic hairs at all during her direct examination. I disagreed. “If she doesn't,” I said at the time, “she's undermining her credibility with the jury.” It was smart of her to do it right after showing the photos because the jury would still be thinking about what they'd just seen.

“Yes,” Boyle said, “we found three hairs.”

“Did you later learn anything more about those hairs?”

“Yes. I learned from the crime investigators that they were pubic hairs.”

“What assumption, if any, did you reach concerning who the pubic hair in Roxanne's bed belonged to?”

“The most obvious assumption was that Roxanne left them, naturally.”

Nina kicked me under the table. Was it possible that Harry Davis hadn't seen what Popofsky did? Did the prosecution not realize that Roxanne didn't have any pubic hair?

Kaplan told Judge Pielmeier that she had no further questions for Detective Boyle. When she turned to walk back to counsel table, her confident bearing made clear that she thought it had gone very well.

Before I began my cross, Judge Pielmeier gave the jurors a fifteen-minute midmorning break, which she never failed to refer to as a leg stretch. She prohibited the lawyers from leaving the courtroom for the first ten minutes, so we wouldn't run into jurors in the bathroom.

“What do you think is going on?” Nina whispered to me as we watched the jurors file out. “Do you think Kaplan doesn't know about the waxing?”

“Popofsky says it's obvious from the autopsy,” I replied, “but who knows? Maybe they just weren't focused down there. It's not like there are any wounds on that part of her body.”

“Are you going to cross Boyle on it?”

“Let's see how it goes,” I said.

W
hen it was my turn with Boyle, I began by playing up the rush-to-judgment angle.

“Detective Boyle, did you ever consider any other possible suspects?”

“Everyone is a suspect at the beginning,” he said, the standard police line.

“For how long were you open-minded to the idea that someone other than L.D. may have committed this crime?”

“Until the evidence indicated that your client killed her.”

The smug look on his face made clear that Boyle viewed this as some type of competition, and he thought he'd scored first. If that was what he believed, he was sorely mistaken. The witness-interrogator battle is hardly a fair fight. If I did this right, I wouldn't ask Boyle any question to which I didn't already know the answer. That meant I'd always have the upper hand.

“Of course, Detective,” I said with a dismissive tone, my signal to the jury that I didn't believe him. “But how long was it before, in your opinion, the evidence pointed to L.D. as Roxanne's killer? Was it days? Or hours? Minutes?”

“I don't remember the exact moment, Counselor. But it wasn't immediate, if that's what you're trying to imply. We considered the facts for some time.”

“Some time,” I repeated. “That sounds like more than a day, then, right?”

“Yes,” he said, as if I must be the stupidest person on earth
not to know that
some time
meant more than twenty-four hours.

His tone didn't matter, however, because now I had the poor bastard. He just didn't know it yet. It felt good to be on top of my game again. After the months of wallowing with a bottle, I was finally back.

“Let's see, now, Detective Boyle,” I said, making little effort not to telegraph I was going to thoroughly enjoy this. “You knew pretty much from the start that L.D. was the victim's boyfriend, right?”

“Yes.”

“As an experienced police detective with twenty-two years on the force, is it common for you to focus on someone that the victim was having a relationship with—such as a husband or boyfriend?”

He paused. His eyes said he realized where this was heading.

“The statistics bear that out.”

“But it's your testimony that the fact that L.D. was Roxanne's boyfriend did not cause you to suspect him from the start because you considered the facts for
some time
—which you just testified is more than twenty-four hours—before focusing on L.D. as a person of interest.”

“I don't believe I said that, Counselor.”

He was right. He hadn't said that, but what a witness actually says doesn't matter. Although jurors can ask for some portions of the trial transcript to be read back to them during deliberations, they usually don't, which means that what the jurors
think
has been said matters much more than the actual testimony. The questions lawyers ask can change what the jurors recall about the testimony, much the way that political punditry sometimes alters people's recollection of the actual event being pontificated about.

“Well, it's true that you just testified that it took
some time
before you concluded that L.D. was guilty. You're not changing your story on that, are you, Detective?”

“No, Counselor. As I said, we arrested the defendant after some consideration.”

Boyle had the tricks down, I had to give him that. He never referred to L.D. by name, always calling him “the defendant” or “your client.” It was subtle, but it reduced L.D.'s humanity, making it easier for the jury to convict. It's also why I never used such terms and invoked L.D.'s name as much as I could. Boyle's other little verbal tic was to call me “Counselor.” It was a nice touch, actually, because it reinforced the idea that I was there doing a job, and not that I actually believed in L.D.'s innocence.

“There was no evidence at the crime scene linking L.D. to the crime, was there, Detective?”

“We believe your client wiped the scene clean of his fingerprints. Given that he was Roxanne's boyfriend, his prints should have been in her house. As a result, the fact that his prints were not there was actually an indicator of guilt, not the other way around.”

“That's very interesting,” I said, my hand on my chin, as if I was actually pondering this information. “So, if I understand what you're saying, it's your testimony that the fact that there was
no
evidence of L.D. being anywhere near the crime scene was interpreted by you to be actual evidence that he was, in fact, there.”

“Objection!” Kaplan called out. “Your Honor, the question is argumentative.”

“Mr. Sorensen, please move on to something else,” said Judge Pielmeier, her way of saying that she agreed with Kaplan, but not so much as to sustain the objection.

“Of course, whoever wiped the crime scene would have removed L.D.'s prints. It didn't have to be L.D. who did that, now, did it, Detective?”

“Was that a question, Counselor?” He chuckled and gave a nasty little smirk.

“You'll find this question more straightforward perhaps, Detective. Did you find the murder weapon in L.D.'s possession?”

“You know that we didn't, Counselor.” Boyle punctuated this thought with a loud sigh, his signal to the jurors that the very fact I was daring to ask him questions was a waste of his precious time. I decided to call him on it, for little reason other than to show him who was really in charge here.

“That's right, Detective, I do know that. But I asked you the question so that the jury would know, too.”

“No, we never found the baseball bat. Are you happy now, Counselor?”

I was happy. I'd called it the murder weapon. He'd called it a baseball bat.

“No, I'm not happy about that, Detective. Because if you had found the murder weapon, be it a baseball bat or something else, it would have proven that L.D. is innocent of this crime. But, by your testimony, it seems pretty clear that you were looking for a baseball bat, which I take to mean that you ignored all the other possible murder weapons, doesn't it?”

“Objection!”

“Sustained. Mr. Sorensen. Please.”

Kaplan had done us a favor. Had Boyle been allowed to answer, he would have undoubtedly given a long explanation as to how they checked for every conceivable weapon. Now the jury assumed the premise in my question was correct.

I walked from the podium until I was standing directly behind L.D., and placed my hands on his shoulders. “Detective,” I continued, “you just told this jury, under an oath to tell the absolute truth, that it took you
some time
to believe that the evidence pointed to L.D. as the murderer. You swore to these jurors that you were thoughtful in your investigation. That you did not rush to judgment solely because the easiest thing to do in a high-profile case is to arrest the boyfriend. That was your testimony, wasn't it, Detective?”

“Objection!”

Whereas just before she shouldn't have objected at all, this time she objected too late, allowing me to get through my speech. Judge Pielmeier said, “Your job is to ask questions, Mr. Sorensen. We all know what was said.”

The gallery laughed, but I noticed that Kaplan didn't. Although it was most likely inadvertent, Judge Pielmeier's quip supported my claim that Boyle had actually testified as I'd recounted.