Body Parts (43 page)

Like Mary, Debra often wondered about Lanett’s final moments. All she could hope was that her daughter died quickly and didn’t suffer.

“I wonder how she even managed to be where she was at. How she got there. ’Cause, knowing my daughter, she would never just go and get in a vehicle or something with just anybody. I just don’t know how she could ever end up that way. . . . I just wonder what it was [like] , her last, last breath.”

Debra said the doctors wanted to medicate her and put her in therapy, but she refused. None of that would bring her baby back.

“She didn’t deserve this . . . and it’s the most horrible-est thing any mother, father, sister, or brother could ever have to deal with in their life.”

In the time it took to get this case to trial, Rudolfo Tamez said he felt like he’d aged thirty years.

A parent wasn’t supposed to lose a child this way. His life would never be the same.

“A million times I wish it had been me that was murdered that day. A million times. The pain is just—you can’t put into words. . . . It just—just was incredible.”

He still had a few happy days, but they were always tinged by the sadness about his daughter Patricia’s passing. Even when he laughed, part of him still could not be joyful. Other people didn’t understand this, because they hadn’t lived through it.

Some days he thought he wouldn’t cry, but then the smallest thing would set him off. He just couldn’t stop crying.

Rudolfo had always hoped that he could help Patricia beat her addiction. Make a better life. Overcome her demons. But now he had lost that chance and he would always regret it.

He couldn’t bring himself to attend the rest of the trial, not because he didn’t love his daughter, but because he didn’t want the publicity. He also didn’t want his granddaughter to find out what had happened to her mother. One day, he would tell the little girl, but for now, he wanted to protect her from the horror.

He understood that sometimes you could lose a child to illness, but Rudolfo couldn’t understand how a man like Wayne could be wired to take Patricia’s life just to experience pleasure.

Rudolfo saw Wayne as a coward who thought the whole process was a joke and wanted to be the center of attention. Before the trial started, Rudolfo told Mazurek that he hoped Wayne would get the death penalty. He felt it would help him heal and bring justice for his daughter.

On the stand in the penalty phase, Rudolfo described the thoughts that clung to his mind. “My words can never come close to the image of the way she died, being taken to the edge of death and brought back—”

“That’s not true,” Wayne blurted out from the defense table, interrupting Rudolfo midsentence. “That never happened.”

Judge Smith directed Wayne to be quiet. “Mr. Ford, it’s probably best that you not say anything to Mr. Tamez.”

Rudolfo tried to speak again, but this time it was Canty who spoke over him.

“Well, I’m sorry,” Canty said to the court.

When Rudolfo tried once more, Canty interrupted him again with an objection. He didn’t think Rudolfo’s statement was an appropriate answer to Mazurek’s question, and the judge agreed. So Mazurek rephrased the question, to which Rudolfo replied that he often thought about what had happened during Patricia’s last minutes.

“Is that hard for you to do?” the prosecutor asked.

“Yeah, very, very difficult for me to think about it.”

Mazurek asked if there was an image of Patricia, alive, that he’d like jurors to take with them.

“The way she used to laugh,” Rudolfo said. “You know, she had this laughter that was contagious and made you feel like . . . here’s somebody that loves life and is . . . right at the essence of what life is. . . . That, and her tremendous, tremendous heart. That’s what I’d like you to remember.”

On Thursday, July 20, Mapes gave an opening statement that was even shorter than Mazurek’s, taking the jury into Wayne’s mind while he was in the woods, pondering what he’d done and what to do next.

“There is a lot of prayer involved. But I know that’s all I can do. There’s nothing I can do to make things right, other than that. So, I take that long journey down that road to that motel, and every step that I take, I can sense my freedom slipping away. But I know that I’ve resolved that I have to do the right thing. After having done so much wrong. So I call my brother . . . the one I trust could still help me turn myself in, ’cause that’s what I have to do.”

Mapes told the jury the defense was going to recall Rodney in a few minutes, then some deputies from Humboldt County, one of whom would talk about how tough it was for Wayne in jail on Max’s birthday that first year.

“We have to do that, because the DA said that he didn’t love his son. And he did.”

Mapes asked the jury to give Wayne a life sentence. “This case is about a man who did the right thing after doing so many wrong and awful things.... And so what that means is that we’re going to ask you, as jurors, to do the right thing for a man who had a conscience and turned himself in.”

When Rodney had taken the stand the first time on May 11, Canty led him through the events leading up to Wayne’s arrest in the sheriff’s lobby.

This time, on July 20, Mapes showed Rodney a photo of Rodney and Wayne as boys, and asked why Wayne’s hands were in Rodney’s lap.

“We were always close,” Rodney said. “We’ve been close our whole lives.”

Rodney, who sat calmly with his hands in front of him, said Wayne changed after his head injury in 1980.

“He was just not my brother,” he said.

As for the doctors who testified otherwise, he said, “He’s not their brother. I’ve known him his whole life.”

Asked if he thought Wayne loved Max, Rodney said, “Definitely. Everything he did after Max was born, he did for Max. I mean, he was excited to have a son. You know, he left a perfectly good job to follow his then-wife to Vegas. . . . He took a lesser-paying job just so he could be close to his son and help take care of him.”

“If he loved Max so much, why did he eventually leave Las Vegas?”

Rodney said he told Wayne to do so. “He really wasn’t getting anywhere in life, and he was just focusing too much on what he couldn’t have any more. His marriage was over. And I told him he needed to move on and focus on his life.”

Mapes asked if Rodney thought Wayne was mentally or emotionally unbalanced.

“Yeah, I think he’s got problems.”

“But you love him in spite of those problems?”

“Yes. He’s my brother.”

“Whose idea was it for him to turn himself in?”

“His. He called me. I mean, I didn’t go looking for him. . . . He realized what he had done was wrong. He turned himself in. You know, he told me a number of times that he didn’t want to hurt people anymore and that he needed to be put away.”

Mapes asked what effect it would have on Rodney if Wayne got the death penalty.

“Devastating effect.”

“Why is that?”

“I love him. I don’t want to see him die.”

The following Tuesday, July 25, the defense called criminalist John Thornton, who had worked for Wayne’s first attorney, Kevin Robinson. Canty and Mapes had originally intended to call Thornton and Robinson during the guilt phase to illustrate that Wayne had a conscience and felt remorse about his crimes because he helped authorities search for Jane Doe’s body parts in the Mad River. They held off, however, in light of a tricky ruling by the judge concerning a limited waiver of attorney-client privilege.

“We would have drowned if we had gotten in the water at all, and even then, we wouldn’t have been able to find a concrete block,” Thornton testified about their first trip to the river in December 1998.

On cross-examination, Thornton acknowledged that he was unaware Wayne had already been out to the area with Freeman and “that they had looked for [the head] and basically determined it had been washed away.”

“So you didn’t document that he sent you to look for something he knew was gone?”

“Objection,” Canty said. “Argumentative.”

“Sustained,” Smith said.

On redirect, Mapes raised the possibility that the river could have deposited silt and rocks that buried the cement block and head even deeper, making them impossible to find.

“I certainly wouldn’t set that possibility aside,” Thornton said.

Next, the defense called two Humboldt correctional officers who testified about two incidents in which Wayne was so depressed that they were concerned he was going to harm himself.

The first was on Max’s birthday in December 1998, when he called on the intercom for a mental-health worker, or he might hurt himself. The second time was after a visit with his father in August 1999.

The defense also called a correctional officer and a sheriff’s sergeant to discuss assault statistics from San Bernardino County jails to establish that Wayne had a reason to collect and fashion makeshift weapons—the jails were a dangerous place, even for inmates like Wayne in protective custody.

“You did have a person who was in protective custody who was murdered this year?” Mapes asked sheriff’s Sergeant Jay Blankenship.

“Yes.”

“So it’s impossible to protect everybody, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And that person was murdered by another inmate?”

“That’s correct.”

Both sides rested on July 27.

The judge gave the jury its new instructions, explaining that after listening to the attorneys’ closing arguments, the panel should consider evidence presented in both phases of the trial, weigh a specified list of eleven aggravating and mitigating circumstances against each other, and then decide what punishment to recommend for the defendant.

As Mazurek flashed photos of the women’s dead and dismembered bodies on a projection screen, he and his ninety-minute closing were interrupted by Canty’s half-dozen objections to inappropriate arguments about the death penalty and other matters.

Alluding to the “Drugs Destroy Dreams” ribbon that Patricia Tamez had given to her father, Mazurek conveyed a similar theme he wanted the jury to take into deliberations: “The defendant destroys dreams and hopes and lives, and not just the lives of the four dead victims in this case, but of their families as well.”

Choosing a punishment of life without the possibility of parole might be the easy way to go, he said, but it would not result injustice.

“The real objective is to fit—fashion a punishment that fits the crime and the criminal. And protecting society has nothing to do with what this defendant deserves.”

Quoting from philosopher Immanuel Kant, Mazurek explained why society imposes the death penalty: “If we favor executing murderers, it’s not because we want to, rather because, however much we do not want to, we consider ourselves obliged to. . . . It is our moral duty to provide justice.”

As Mazurek gave his analysis of the aggravating and mitigating factors the jury would be asked to consider, he negated all the mitigating factors, which included whether the victims participated or consented to the defendant’s homicidal conduct, whether Wayne acted under “extreme duress” or “substantial domination” of another person, whether he had an accomplice, and whether he was under the influence of “extreme mental disturbance” or was too impaired by mental disease, defect, or intoxication to understand the criminality of his conduct.

“None of these apply to his conduct . . . and had the defendant not been able to conform his conduct to the law or . . . was impaired, there would be some other verdict than first-degree murder,” Mazurek said, prompting Canty to voice an objection that the judge sustained.

Rather than putting themselves in Wayne’s shoes, as the defense suggested, Mazurek urged the jurors to put themselves in the victims’ shoes as Wayne raped and strangled the life out of them.

“The last face they ever see on this earth [is] not any other family members, it’s this defendant. Imagine that for a while. . . . Justice is the death penalty for these four girls. Justice demands that death be imposed.”

In Canty’s forty-five-minute closing, he told the jury that no one was trying to excuse Wayne’s behavior, devalue the victims’ lives, or diminish their relatives’ feelings of loss.

Canty noted that Wayne may have made threats to assault correctional officers since he’d been behind bars, but he’d never actually carried them out.

“Mr. Ford is going to spend the rest of his life in prison, whatever verdict you decide upon. So this is not about excusing behavior. He is going to be punished. The issue is what is the appropriate penalty.”

Canty painted a picture of what Wayne’s life in prison would be for the next forty years if he was spared the death penalty.

“He will look back over a life in a single cell, in protective custody, living in a place of constant violence, where your day is scheduled, and a place where inmates hold trays hostage to be able to talk to a sergeant, a place where you do not decide when the lights go on, when the lights go off, or when to eat your meals, or even what to eat—a place where your single solitary concern is survival.”

Canty reminded the jury that it did not speak for the victims or their families, but rather the community at large. And like the blindfolded statue of Lady Justice, who holds a scale in one hand and a sword in the other, he said, the jury held “the power to use that sword for execution or for life.”

He also encouraged the jury to consider sympathy, compassion, and mercy in their deliberations, because Wayne had surrendered to authorities.

This time quoting William Shakespeare, Canty cited a statement by the attorney character Portia: “The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth like gentle rain from Heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed. It blesses him that gives and him that takes.”

Wayne Ford was in court today, Canty said, because he’d repented.

“[He] now is in your hands. And you have the power to decide whether to condemn him or allow him to live out his life in prison. The decision you make will speak to society about the consequences of turning yourself in. You have the power, because Mr. Ford presented himself to you to make this decision voluntarily, by walking into that jail in 1998. Please do not condemn this man.”