A Mother's Trial (44 page)

The tiny plane took off raggedly. Bucking from municipal airport to rural field, it skipped in a haphazard tour around the Bay Area on its route south. At each airport, prisoners clanked off in a shuffle of chains and sweat to be replaced by new convicts. Priscilla was given nothing to eat or drink. When she asked to use the bathroom, she was refused. She had departed Marin County in the early afternoon, but the sun had set in a froth of lavender by the time the plane stopped for the night in Visalia.

Visalia’s jail resembled something from the set of
Cool Hand Luke.
The holding cell where Priscilla was put for the night reduced her to tears. Bugs scraped along the floor, and smears decorating the walls gave testimony to the earlier fate of other insects. The metal toilet, which was built into the wall along with an attached metal sink, smelled of old excrement. Priscilla was forced to strip, and her clothes were taken from her. They insisted she remove her contact lenses. She was given jail clothes, a pallet, and a blanket that stank of disinfectant.

The cell was crowded, and as evening dragged into night, more residents appeared. Drunks were pushed hastily through the door. One of these vomited throughout the night; another was afflicted with diarrhea. A fat woman squeezed in and perched all night long, teetering gently, on the metal table. The woman laughed and talked in a street vernacular Priscilla did not understand. The noise was constant and assaultive; after her early bout of tears, Priscilla sat stoically, a headache building. She retreated to a corner finally, and crouched there, her head in her hands.

Bag lunches were passed around. Priscilla was hungry, but she couldn’t eat; she could not force down the inedible-looking food. She wondered if CIW would resemble the Visalia jail, and how, if it did, she might endure it.

At four A.M. a blare of country music burst from the loudspeaker system and the lights came on. A line of men chained together was brought in. Breakfast at five was soggy and nauseating. Priscilla refused it numbly. She was given her clothes and told to wait since the tiny airport was fogged in. There was always morning fog in the central valley, and she waited a long time.

At last, handcuffed again, she boarded the small plane once more. The trip was again long and circuitous as they zigzagged to the coast and then back, loading and unloading passengers. Finally they arrived at the Chino airport, a few miles from Frontera. Priscilla had not been to the bathroom all day and was in agony.

“I have to go—please, I can’t stand it!” she said to the woman-officer. Grudgingly the guard led her to the bathroom, but she unlocked only one of Priscilla’s handcuffs. Priscilla struggled a long time with her pantyhose while the guard stared at her with indifference.

Perhaps the Department of Corrections deliberately made transportation to Frontera unpleasant, it later occurred to Priscilla, because when she finally arrived at the California Institution for Women, she thought she had gone to heaven. She did not notice the smell of the dairy farm down the road, nor the chain-linked fence topped by barbed wire, nor the guard towers. All she saw was the green grass—acres of it—the neat cottages, and the clean administration building. And trees.

She was taken into the reception center and her chains were removed. In a few minutes a guard brought her soup and a grilled sandwich and left her alone to eat. It was silent and clean, and after what she had been through, completely bearable.

She was processed and taken to her room in the reception center. Every new and returning inmate spent her first weeks in the RC. Priscilla’s room resembled a college dorm and possessed a wooden door rather than bars. She tried the bed. Then she closed the door and lay down. She thought she had to stay in her room. No one explained the rules to her. No one told her she could go into the yard anytime she wanted, or down the hall to watch TV, or play Ping-Pong in the recreation center. No one mentioned the pool. And no one thought to tell her that closing the door to her room automatically locked it.

Priscilla missed dinner her first night at CIW because she could not get out. She was finally able to attract the attention of another inmate who came to release her.

“Well, you’ve missed dinner, but in the future you can order food from the canteen and have it in your room, as long as you do it by Saturday,” the girl told her, smiling. She stayed with Priscilla for a while, explaining some of the rules. Priscilla was impressed by the amount of freedom inmates were allowed. And the girl seemed nice. But later that evening, another inmate stopped by to talk.

“Don’t you hang around that girl,” she advised seriously. “She’s got a bad reputation. Watch what you say around her.” Priscilla swallowed. There was a game here, and rules to be learned; she saw that clearly. This girl was all right, that one bad. Don’t talk about your crime; don’t be honest. Watch yourself.

Priscilla soon would learn something else about prison. It was something Ted Lindquist could have told her. Everybody there was innocent.

3

On Thursday, October eleventh, Steve and Ed Caldwell flew PSA from San Francisco to Ontario Airport to attend Priscilla’s serious offender hearing. In July, shortly after her departure for CIW, the Community Release Board had set Priscilla’s term of imprisonment for Tia's murder at the median term of six years. This was automatic in converting an indeterminate sentence to the determinate sentences now in force. But because this was a murder case and in addition involved more than one count, it was also automatic to hold an enhancement hearing to determine whether the sentence should be increased to the maximum—in Priscilla’s case, to seven years.

This was Steve’s third visit to Frontera since July. He and Marietta and the boys had driven down shortly after Priscilla’s arrival, camping at the nearby Prado State Park campgrounds. And they had returned, after Marietta’s departure for North Carolina, the last weekend in August. By then Priscilla had expected to be moved from RC to Campus, which was the main part of the facility. But August found her still in the reception center. Because she was a superintendent’s case—assigned, due to the nature of her crime and the publicity attached to her case, to the superintendent personally—her transfer to Campus had been delayed. Since visiting at the RC was much less appealing and open than at Campus, with visitors confined to a small airless room without food-vending machines, the boys had soon grown irritable and restless. The visits had also proved difficult for Steve.

He did not want to burden Priscilla with his problems, though he had many. After her departure, Steve had switched to night shift at juvenile hall. Each night, before reporting to work at eleven, he brought Erik and Jason to the Doudiets to sleep. At seven, he returned there, retrieved the boys, took them home, and readied them for school. He slept until they came home. It was the only way he could find to spend time with the boys but it was hard on Jan and Jim, he knew, and it was beginning to tire him to the point of illness. He was smoking heavily and felt depressed and out-of-sorts. On top of that, the boys—and particularly Jason—were taking the separation from Priscilla very hard. Jason had suddenly forgotten how to read. But Steve didn’t want to mention this to Priscilla. She had enough troubles of her own.

At Ontario Airport, Steve and Ed rented a car for the forty-five minute drive to Frontera.

“How was Pris doing the last time you were here?” Ed asked.

“She was reporting some hassles because it’s a child-related case. She was working in the kitchen, she said, and some inmate started pointing at her and holding her nose and talking about the rotten odor, that it smelled dead—stuff like that.”

“How’s she handling it?”

“Who knows? She’s so naive about things. She thought if she just told people she was innocent, they wouldn’t hassle her. She told me that the ones who go after her the most are the ones who feel guilty about their own kids, not the ones who are loving mothers. But she’s starting to learn the institutional lingo. Calls everybody girls. You know they turn everybody into children in institutions. Makes them easier to deal with.”

“But no one’s actually threatened her right out?”

“Some lady in the kitchen who was in for a knifing got burned at her for something and started pointing Pris out to all her friends. Pris felt pretty threatened by that!” Steve shuddered and his voice hardened suddenly. “Christ, why don’t they leave her alone? She’s a better mother than any of them.”

Ed lifted a hand from the wheel and patted his arm. “Steve, I know,” he said. “What about you? How are things going?”

“Oh, I’ll make it. I mean, as you know, I’ve got a net worth of minus thirty-three thousand dollars, monthly expenses of over twelve hundred dollars, and a salary of fifteen hundred dollars. Not to mention the forty thousand dollars I owe you in fees and costs. You know, one time I told Dr. Satten I’d be satisfied to come out of this with my family intact, that the rest didn’t matter. Now I don’t even have that.”

“Well, the defense fund is still in operation.” Caldwell raised a finger from the steering wheel to tick off a point. “And one juror—that old lady-librarian—is even contributing to it! We’ve also got this new attorney, Jonathan Purver, to handle the appeal for a new trial, and he’s supposed to be a bright, capable guy.” He raised another finger. “And personally I think Burke’s denial of our request for Pris’s release pending appeal will be overturned.” A third finger came off the wheel. “Then there’s this Syntex thing: that could win us a new trial.”

“Right!” Steve was animated for the first time. When the news about the formula recall for chloride deficiency had broken in August, everyone had called Steve in excitement. Syntex Corporation, a drug and baby formula manufacturer, had withdrawn two of their baby formulas due to chloride deficiency, he learned. It had been an innocent mistake, apparently. With all the new linkages between sodium consumption and heart and arterial disease, Syntex had decided to reduce drastically the amount of chloride in its formulas. No government standards existed for baby formulas; no agency tested them. No one realized that certain levels of chloride were essential for infant growth until babies began to get sick. Then a doctor in Tennessee, Dr. Shane Roy, had tracked down the problem to the chloride-deficient formulas manufactured by Syntex.

But what was significant to Priscilla’s case was that the two formulas recalled were Neo-Mull-Soy and Cho-free. Both Tia and Mindy, and particularly Tia, had been on Cho-free for months. Maybe that had caused their problems.

Ed was working on this new development, Steve knew. He was in touch with Dr. Roy. And so was Josh Thomas. So far nothing definitive was known. Syntex wasn’t talking, and there was disagreement about which lots of formula had been affected. A number of lots manufactured in 1978, and probably other lots sold as early as 1975, had certainly been deficient.

Steve did not know how this might affect Pris. There seemed to be no correlation linking decreased chloride with increased sodium levels, but Ed had found that decreased chloride in a formula could lead to increased bicarbonate levels. Many times over the course of her illness, Tia had exhibited elevated carbon dioxide levels, and those were a reflection of bicarbonate. Still, although there had been one or two exceptions, her chloride level had not been decreased. Also, she had been receiving food other than Cho-free some of the time, while it appeared that the babies who had fallen sick from the formulas had been younger and consequently had been given no other food. There was another difference: although these chloride-deficient babies had not thrived, they had not suffered from diarrhea.

The investigation into the formula was only preliminary, but Steve thought it might well suggest an answer. At the very least it would throw up considerable doubt, and Steve was confident that the appellate court would be forced to grant a new trial on the basis of this new evidence.

Another forty-five minutes elapsed. Finally the correctional officer behind the glassed-in section that looked out on both the Visiting Room and the Waiting Room called out, “Priscilla Phillips.”

Steve and Ed were buzzed into the brightly lit Visiting Room that resembled a train station with its line of vending machines and its TV bolted high on one wall. Still, Steve thought, train stations did not have guards in one corner who insisted that visitor and inmate embrace only in front of them, and who refused to allow an inmate to handle the change visitors were permitted to bring in for the vending machines. Priscilla was not even supposed to push the machine buttons for her selection.

Then Steve saw her coming in through the back door, pulling down and adjusting her clothes unselfconsciously from the search, and when she looked up and smiled and started to run to them, Steve had to blink hard. He missed the hell out of this lady—that was the worst of it.

4

Exactly five weeks later, Priscilla returned in the six-seater airplane from CIW via Visalia to Gnoss Field. She hadn’t wanted to make the trip, agreeing only at Ed's insistence. “You have to be here for your bail hearing; I can’t emphasize that strongly enough,” he had said.

“But I can’t stand another trip like the last one. You know how terrible it was. Can’t I just wait down here, and then if Burke decides to release me on bail, I’ll just walk out of here?”

“No, Priscilla. I want you to be here. Grit your teeth and bear it. I want that judge to see you.”

“Everyone here says there’s no way he’ll grant bail—they’re all laughing at me and my optimism.”

“Most people don’t get out on bail pending appeal. But you know the appellate court ordered Burke to reconsider his decision. I think you’ve got a good chance or I wouldn’t subject you to this.”

“Okay.” She had packed her belongings: her clothes and the clock radio and her Bible. She had said good-bye to some of her new friends—among them Kathy, who was in on a child-abuse case; Laura, a Beverly Hills socialite; and Wendy Yoshimura, who had been captured with Patty Hearst. Wendy had left the RC for Campus the same day as Priscilla, and her enhancement hearing had also coincided with Priscilla’s.