An Almost Perfect Murder (26 page)

“Would it be unreasonable for the rest of us to assume that he . . . found out he couldn’t control Kathy Augustine, and he was searching for another person that he could control?” Barb asked.

“I don’t know that that’s unreasonable, no,” Nielsen said.

“Okay. So we’re back to the sociopath, aren’t we? Could have been,” Barb said. “Did he complete SEAL training?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Then I’m not certain what all the hubbub has been about him being a Navy SEAL. So he wasn’t one, was he?”

“No, he wasn’t.”

“He was a medic.”

“He was a medic,” agreed Nielsen. “He was not a Navy SEAL. He didn’t complete the training.”

“Right,” Barb said. “He started, he stopped, he didn’t make it.”

Barb reminded Nielsen that he had testified that Chaz had not wanted to light the next romantic fantasy until the current one was finished. That had been his style in many of his relationships.

“What do you call what he’s doing to Ms. Ramirez, a twenty-one-year-old, that he’s starting these e-mails, and ‘I love you,’ and ‘I wish I could give you a million roses,’ and all that business? Isn’t he starting that [next fantasy]?”

“Absolutely,” agreed Nielsen. “He is starting—”

“Why did you say he didn’t want to light the romantic fantasy until the other one was done?”

“I may have said it poorly,” Nielsen said, now possibly beginning to feel a little beat up. “What I was trying to say was that he had [a] romantic fantasy in his head. He was, in fact, trying to engage her in the same fantasy. But he had not reached the point where, in his own mind, he could leave the relationship or have an open physical relationship with Ms. Ramirez that—”

“But that’s not what I’m asking about,” Barb interrupted. “You told us that he didn’t want to light the next fantasy until the current relationship was over.”

“Okay.”

“But he did that.”

“Okay. The dispute between us is about the word ‘light.’”

“It was your word,” Barb said. “I wrote it down.
Don’t light the romantic fantasy.
”

“When I try to explain it, I’m not succeeding.”

“Explain away, Doc. What does ‘light’ mean to you?”

“The way I meant it was that he—he had—at least what he told me and what Miss Ramirez’s e-mails indicated—is that he had not crossed that boundary. He had not ignited the relationship to be an intimate relationship. He had only treated it as a fantasy. And then that’s my understanding from both her e-mails and his.”

“So unless it was actual physical relationship, it was just a fantasy,” Barb said.

“I think that’s the way he thought about it, is that it was innocuous and safe as long as he didn’t make a final physical commitment.”

“I see. Safe for whom?”

“Him.”

“It’s all about him, isn’t it, Doc? Back to the sociopath?”

“That’s true.”

“Is it your testimony that after July eleventh when Kathy Augustine died that Mr. Higgs turned into a grieving husband?”

“It’s my testimony that that’s what he described,” Nielsen said. “That he felt grief and that he responded with grief... after the death of Kathy Augustine.”

“And how long did that grief last?”

“Well, again, it’s tough to measure. I think there’s probably still some grief. But I’ve also observed the e-mails in which he not long after her death made statements that would be inconsistent with deep psychological pain.”

“Would be inconsistent with deep—so the August third e-mail to Ramirez and the August twenty-eighth e-mail to Ramirez . . .” Barb mentioned a third e-mail to another woman. “You didn’t see that one?”

“I didn’t see that one.”

“I’ll just ask you about the first two,” Barb said. “Those would be inconsistent with grief?”

“They’re inconsistent with a deep and persistent grief response, yes,” Nielsen said.

“How about did they show you any pictures that Mr. Higgs received over his cell phone near the end of September 2006?”

“No.” Nielsen must have sensed that another surprise was on its way.

“Did they tell you about a nurse that he was trying to kick off a relationship with in September? At least in September of 2006.”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well, either they did or they didn’t?”

“I don’t have all the dates and times and people nailed down, but I don’t think they did.”

“Okay. . . . May I approach, Your honor?”

“Yes,” Kosach said.

“I’m going to show you some pictures,” Barb told the witness. “This is a photograph that Mr. Higgs received from a nurse.”

Barb flipped through a couple of photos, and each time, he said, “Same nurse, different outfit.

“Text message,” Barb said. “That’s the nurse’s first name. The nurse is asking for his photos now.
Maybe we could try out the
—they didn’t tell you about those?”

“No, I haven’t seen those.”

“Okay. Well, you’ve got pictures of a scantily clad woman going to him. Two in just—I guess you’d call it ‘the bra and the cleavage’ show. And one with the panties showing, and her hand right above the waistline. And then you’ve got a text message about
Can I drive that cute little Bug of yours sometime? Maybe we can try out the backseat.
This is in September 2006. Is he still grieving?”

“That’s inconsistent with what I would call grief,” Nielsen said.

“Okay. So now we’ve got what from your testimony? From his words, and his words alone, he was grieving. But from you getting all the information, or at least more information, he’s inconsistent with grieving. Is that accurate?”

“Partly.”

 

 

The defense made a gallant attempt at undoing the damage that had been done by the prosecution’s cross-examination of the defense witness. His witness, under questioning by him, said that all of the psychological testing he had done on Chaz Higgs had not confirmed a diagnosis of sociopath or antisocial personality disorder. Going point by point through nearly everything that Barb had questioned Nielsen about, Houston called Barb’s conclusions “half-baked truths” that had been chosen for the purpose of isolating certain facts “to make those facts stand for something out of context.”

However, Barb’s attempts at turning the defense witness to the prosecution’s benefit had been skillful, and it would be difficult to erase the doubt that he had instilled in each juror’s mind during the process.

Chaz Higgs was scheduled as the defense’s last witness, whereby he planned to testify in his own defense. Before allowing him to do so, however, Judge Kosach wanted to make sure that Chaz understood that he had the “absolute right” to testify in the case, and that if he did so, he would be cross-examined.

“And I will say vigorously cross-examined,” Kosach added. “Do you understand that?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Chaz replied.

“Now you have the absolute right to not testify in this case,” Kosach said. “Do you understand that?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

In his efforts to be fair, as well as prudent, Kosach also explained to Chaz that if he decided to not testify, the jury would be instructed to not form any adverse opinion about him because he did not testify. He also wanted to be certain that Chaz had consulted with his attorneys with regard to testifying.

 

 

When Higgs took the stand, Houston asked him why he had changed his name from William Charles Higgs to Chaz Higgs. He responded that he had changed his name because there were four people named William Higgs in his family, and it had created a lot of problems over the years.

“So I dropped my first name, since everyone went by first and last name, and I shortened my middle name,” he said.

In taking him through some of his past history, Houston enabled the jury to hear why Chaz, in his own words, had joined the U.S. Navy and that he chose the medical field because “I love helping people, and that was an avenue for me to be able to do that.” He also testified that he had broken his arm during SEAL training, and that was why he had been unable to finish the program. He remained attached to the SEAL unit, however, as a medic for ten months.

Houston pointed out that Chaz had served in the Middle East, stationed in Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, an area that was designated a war zone. He had helped with the people injured in the June 25, 1996, terrorist attack of the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

“When you respond to an emergent situation or assist with a situation of emergency, Mr. Higgs, how do you personally react to that?”

“I have to—I have to focus,” Chaz said. “I have to focus. And, I mean, I was trained to focus because you’re ineffective, you can’t function if you have all this chaos going on and you just lose it. So I have to focus on what I need to get done.”

“Are you trying to explain to the jury why perhaps some of the folks that saw you the morning of July eighth might have misunderstood what they saw?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

During his testimony, Chaz told about how he had decided to go to nursing school after leaving the navy and how, upon graduation from nursing school and passing the board exams, he had gone to work at Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas, where he met Kathy Augustine. He described his emotional involvement with Kathy at the beginning of their relationship. He explained how she had taken him out for coffee after forgetting to give him a thank-you card for the care that he had provided for her husband, Charles.

“It was almost instantaneous,” Chaz testified. “I mean, we went out and—I guess the best way to describe it is, you know when you meet somebody you just feel—you feel chemistry. And that’s what we had. We started talking while we were having coffee, and we just hit it off. We didn’t talk about politics or nursing. We just talked about life. . . .”

At one point, Chaz provided details about how John Snow, who was Secretary of the Treasury in Washington, D.C., at the time, had invited Kathy to interview for the position of the next U.S. treasurer. After being told by Snow that she had the position, she had said that she could be back in D.C. within two weeks, according to Chaz. However, when they returned to Reno, the allegations that eventually led to her impeachment were being prepared by the state’s attorney general’s office, and an investigation was begun. He said that it hadn’t taken long for word of the investigation to reach Washington, D.C., and they promptly told her that “we don’t need you anymore” and that they were going to go in a different direction. Chaz said that the decision had devastated her, and had impacted her mood and her ability to communicate with him.

“Before that, she had been really loving and just open,” Chaz said. “Like I said, we had this little world we had created, and it was fantastic. Then after that started, it was like she just closed off. She became very defensive. For obvious reasons. Very angry. And just, you know, trying to protect herself from all this.”

He testified that he did not like politics and was not comfortable being in the political arena. Even though he had eventually told her that he couldn’t take it anymore and was going to leave her, she repeatedly had asked him to stay to help her through the tough times of the impeachment, and he had done so. He hadn’t abandoned her in the face of adversity. However, when he learned that she was planning to run for state treasurer, he decided that he’d had enough—that had been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

After her impeachment trial and censure, he said, Kathy’s career “had pretty much been decimated.” Nonetheless, she kept trying to fix things to get her political life back on track, and in 2005, they had started going to political functions again.

“And it was sad,” Chaz said, “because . . . nobody wanted to touch her now. She was damaged goods. We’d go to political functions, sit down at a table, and people would leave. People would get up from where we were sitting and just leave.... Every time we went to one of these things, we’d get back in the car and she’d be crying, she’d be hurt. She’d say, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe this is happening to me.’ It was just sad.”

Watching his wife’s political life being destroyed had been devastating for him as well, Chaz said.

“I was a mess.... This was a woman I cared about . . . ,” Chaz said. “I was stressed-out. I couldn’t sleep. I was losing weight. I lost forty-five pounds in 2005 over this. . . .”

Even though he had wanted a divorce by this time, Chaz said, he was ashamed over the e-mails between himself and Linda Ramirez, and even though he was telling the jury how much he had loved Kathy, he explained that his mean comments about Kathy to Linda had been his way of venting his anger over the way that Kathy had been treating him and her refusal to leave politics, like she had previously promised she would.

“When it came time for you to make a decision on how to end the relationship with Kathy,” Houston asked, “what were you going to do as far as finalizing everything? How are you going to end it?”

“I was going to divorce her.”

“Did you plan to kill her?”

“No. No.”

“You’ve been divorced before, haven’t you, sir?”

“I have. Three times.”

“Did you ever feel the need to kill any other wife?”

“No.”

“Was there anything going on in this relationship with Kathy that led you to the point of frustration or such extreme anger that you would have to murder her?”

“Never. Never. I never got to that point.”

Houston turned the questioning toward Kathy’s will, and Chaz said that he had been aware of it. He had been aware of the fact that many people had referred to him as “arm candy” for Kathy, and he had encouraged her to make a will or a trust and to list as a beneficiary anybody she wanted. Houston showed him the will, which had been marked as Exhibit 41, in which Kathy had left everything to her daughter, Dallas. He said that he was never in the relationship with Kathy for the money. What had kept him in the relationship, he said, was what they’d had in the beginning because he kept hoping that they would get that magic back.

Chaz said that he had made the decision to leave Kathy in 2006 after she had made the decision to run for state treasurer. He said that he had told her: “Kathy, I’m done. I can’t do this again.... I am really done this time.” He said that he had consulted a lawyer to draw up papers for an uncontested divorce, began looking for an apartment and had found one, and had opened his own bank account.

He said that he began to become concerned about her health because he had been aware of the mitral valve prolapse condition that she had. He said that he had urged her to see a cardiologist, and she always told him that she was taking care of it. Sometimes they’d go for walks together to try and work off the stress levels, but it became more difficult for her over time. She would get more tired, he said, and short of breath. She couldn’t sleep, either, he said. He explained that she had tried to keep her health concerns to herself because she worried that the public might find out about her weaknesses, and was concerned that political opponents might take her health condition and use it against her. That was, after all, politics, he said.

In response to questions about fellow nurse Kim Ramey and what she said to the police, and subsequently had testified to, Chaz said that he hadn’t remembered things the way she had portrayed them. He acknowledged having been in a somewhat heated telephone call with Kathy, but denied saying, “We’ll talk when I fucking get home tonight,” because he said that he would not have used the word “fucking” in another person’s presence at work. It would have been unprofessional, he said. Instead, he charged that Ramey had been eavesdropping on him while he talked to Kathy. When Ramey had brought up the Darren Mack case, he said that he did not remember saying, “He did it all wrong. He should have just hit her with succs.” He said that there were several things that he did not remember talking to Ramey about that day because he wasn’t really paying attention to her. He said that he had been put off by the fact that she had just jumped into his conversation with Kathy. He also said that although he knew what the drug succinylcholine was, he hadn’t known until this case that it could not be easily detected postmortem.