Death Sentence (23 page)

Britt called rescue squad member John McPherson to tell about taking Stuart to the hospital on the night of his death.

“He was breathing really rapid—really fast and his color was real gray-looking. He just couldn’t be still. He would try to turn over. He would try to sit up. Of course, all the time we were trying to get him to stay on the litter.”

“Was he making noises?”

“Yes, sir, he was moaning and groaning all the way over there.”

McPherson said he and two other squad members stayed with Stuart at the hospital for more than an hour. “He seemed to get more restless, seemed to hurt more. I’m sure they gave him a shot, maybe two. We were holding both hands and arms and legs, trying to hold him in the bed. He was trying to move his hands, but we did our best to hold him down.”

“And how long did you and the other attendants stay there holding him immobile?” Britt asked.

“Until such time as he threw back his head and gave a long, hard scream. I dashed out and got the nurse and the nurse and doctor came in and started to administer a tracheotomy on him.”

“How loud was the scream that you say he uttered?”

“Fairly loud.”

“Can you duplicate it here?”

“Object,” said Jacobson.

“Overruled, if he can,” said McKinnon.

“Well, he just threw back his head and said…”

And McPherson threw back his own head and let out a blood-curdling scream that echoed through the big courtroom, leaving no person in the room with any doubt about Stuart’s final agonies.

“Object,” Jacobson called testily. “Move to strike.”

“Overruled,” said the judge. “Motion denied.”

McPherson went on to briefly describe the doctors’ efforts to save Stuart after the death scream.

“What eventually happened?”

“After several tries of resuscitation and CPR, they decided it was of no use, that he had passed on.”

“Your witness,” Britt said.

Jacobson had little with which to counter. He asked if McPherson had spoken with Velma at the hospital.

“I believe that at one time after I stepped out in the hall she asked me was he going to be all right.”

“Did she appear to be concerned about him?”

“At the time, yes, sir.”

John Larson, a physician from Sanford who had been working relief at the emergency room when Stuart was brought in the second time, described the treatments he started, the tests he began. “I was very puzzled, because I thought that he had just not had enough fluids,” he said. “I had gone out and talked to the physician that was on call … and I told him that he would have to hurry because the man was dying and I didn’t know really what he was dying from.”

“Did the possibility of arsenic poison ever occur to you?”

“No, sir, it did not.”

“If that had occurred to you, and if it had been arsenic poisoning, could you have saved the life at that time?”

“Not at that time, no. I believe he was dying before he actually got there.”

On cross-examination, Larson told Jacobson that he had treated hundreds of poisoning cases in his thirty-six years of practice.

“What would you have done in a case of arsenic poisoning?”

“Well, if I had known, you give BAL, British antilewisite.”

“That is a type of medication?”

“Yes.”

If it had been administered a day before, would it have saved him?

“I have never treated a case of arsenic,” said the doctor. “I have no idea whether it would or not.”

Velma scribbled in a spiral-bound notebook as Richard Jordan told of hurrying to the hospital and attempting to revive Stuart. Britt used him to verify the symptoms of arsenic poisoning: vomiting, diarrhea, severe abdominal pains, restlessness, mental confusion.

“Do you know this lady here?” Jacobson asked, pointing at Velma.

“Yes, sir.”

“The fact is, you have treated her, have you not?”

He had treated her for a neck injury following a car accident, he said, and again for tension headaches, giving her a prescription for Tylenol with codeine.

Did he recall speaking to her at the hospital on the night of Stuart’s death?

He had told her that Stuart was dead.

“You don’t recall what her reaction was, do you?”

“She appeared to be grieved.”

Alice Storms was a frail, intense woman, and she seemed nervous as she took the stand.

She told about her father bringing Velma by her house on January 31. “He seemed to be in very good health and very happy acting, playing with my baby and looking at some old pictures of the family,” she said.

She went on to describe her father’s illness and the events of the next three days. She was relieved, she said, when Velma told her on Friday that Stuart seemed to be improving.

“Sometime in the afternoon I got a call and she said that he was complaining of aching,” she said. “She asked me if she should give him an aspirin.”

“What?” asked Britt, as if he hadn’t heard correctly.

“She asked me if she should give him an aspirin. I told her if he had a fever that it certainly wouldn’t hurt, that it normally makes the aching better.”

About six or seven, Alice said, she called Velma to check on her father and Velma told her that she fixed oyster stew for him.

“Did Velma Barfield tell you whether or not your father ate the oyster stew?”

“She said she prepared it and he ate it.”

Alice said she’d been “really surprised” when Velma called later that evening to tell her that her father was back at the hospital. “I think she told me that he had flared up in bed—sat up—was talking out of his head and that she had, could not keep him on the bed. She had gone and gotten chairs from the dining room and put them beside the bed to hold him on and had gone to the phone and called the rescue squad. I told her I was on my way to the hospital.”

She had seen her father only from a distance in an examining room, she said. “I could see him from the shoulders up. He just looked to me really bad off and kind of gray, pale.”

“How long did you stay there, please, ma’am?”

“We were called back in the little room and told that he had died.”

The family had approved an autopsy, she said, and all of them, Velma included, had gone to her home in shock.

The judge interrupted for a recess, and, afterward, Britt asked Alice if she was familiar with her father’s handwriting.

“Yes, sir.”

“Had you had occasion to see his checks from time to time?”

“Yes, sir.”

Jacobson quickly objected, and the judge asked the jury to leave.

Velma was not on trial for forging checks, Jacobson pleaded, hoping to keep out the exhibits Britt was about to produce.

“Let’s see what you are going to show, Mr. Britt,” said the judge.

He produced four checks in plastic bags. These bore Stuart’s verifiable signatures. Then he brought forward three more checks bearing signatures purporting to be Stuart’s, all made payable to Velma. One, for $100, was dated November 4, 1977, and had been cashed November 8. The second, for $95, was dated November 23, cashed November 25. The third, for $300, was dated January 31, 1978, cashed February 3.

“This,” Britt said of the final check, “is a very critical piece of evidence.”

Jacobson protested that Britt had to be able to show that Stuart had not authorized Velma to sign the checks on his behalf, and that obviously wasn’t possible. “To allow these to come in would be pure speculation,” he said.

“I do not intend to introduce them,” Britt responded. “I merely want them marked for identification. Obviously, if I could not establish these things that the lawyer is talking about, I would not be entitled to introduce them.”

McKinnon allowed Britt to proceed, and the jury returned.

Alice looked at the first four checks and said they all bore her father’s signature. Britt showed her the other three. Did she recognize those?

She did indeed, but Britt asked her nothing about the signatures.

“Your witness,” he said, turning to Jacobson.

Jacobson handled Alice cautiously, quizzing her about how she had come to know Velma, how often she had seen her.

“Did you ever see her take any medication?” he asked.

“No, sir, I did not.”

“Did you ever ask Mrs. Barfield her opinion about whether or not an autopsy should be taken?”

“I am quite sure we did at one time.”

“Do you recall what she said?”

“No, sir. I can’t really say exactly what she said. But she never did object to one.”

“No further questions,” said Jacobson.

As his final witness of the day, Britt called Bob Andrews, the pathologist who had performed the autopsy on Stuart. Andrews said he had found nothing unusual and couldn’t determine the cause of death. No toxicological screenings were done at first, he noted.

“Is this a routine thing in autopsies?” asked Britt.

“It is not routine to screen for arsenic poisoning.”

Andrews told the jurors that he continued to work with tissues from Stuart’s organs because he was mystified, and that he finally sent them off for tests. Those tests showed that Stuart had high concentrations of arsenic in both his liver and blood.

“It is my opinion,” he said, “that Stuart Taylor’s death was from acute arsenic poisoning.”

“Take the witness,” said Britt.

Did his opinion about the cause of death rule out any other cause? Jacobson asked.

“Yes, it does.”

The doctor stepped down, and Judge McKinnon recessed court for the day.

In just a half day’s testimony, Britt had established murder, let the jurors see, feel—and especially hear— the victim’s dying agonies, and had hinted at a motive. Next, he would show the jury that Stuart Taylor had not been Velma’s only victim.

13

When Joe Freeman Britt called Margie Lee Pittman on the third day of the trial, Jacobson objected and asked that the jury be excused.

“Your Honor, the state is bringing up evidence about offenses that are not charged,” he told the judge. “Anything about the death of John Henry Lee would be irrelevant in this trial.”

“I’d better see what your intent is, Mr. Britt,” said McKinnon. “What do you propose from this witness?”

“Boiling it down to its essence, Your Honor, I can say this. The state is in a position to prove conclusively that this defendant murdered John Henry Lee by arsenic poisoning, that the symptoms were the same as the symptoms of the Taylor case, that there was a motive involved in killing him and that related to a check that she had written on Mrs. Lee.” He went on to tell the judge that Record Lee, too, had fallen ill, and a sample of her hair and fingernails, tested months later, also contained arsenic.

He planned as well to demonstrate conclusively that Velma had killed her mother and Dollie Edwards, he said, and would further show that she had killed Jennings Barfield, although that evidence would be circumstantial. Velma frowned, shook her head, and whispered to Jacobson when Britt spoke of Jennings.

As precedent for allowing evidence of the other deaths, Britt cited a 1938 case in which a man was tried for giving strychnine to his daughter to collect insurance. In that case, in order to establish intent, the state had been allowed to show that the defendant previously had murdered his two wives for the same purpose, and that case had been upheld by higher courts.

“You have identically the same situation here, if it please the court,” Britt argued. “From the very outset of this case, the crux has been intent.”

He cited Velma’s contention that she hadn’t intended to kill Stuart, only to make him sick. “That makes that the central issue. For that reason the state should be allowed to show these other killings.”

In addition, Britt noted, Velma had entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, maintaining that she didn’t understand the nature of her act. “And I want to be in a position to show that she did very well know the nature of her act. As a matter of fact, she probably knew more about arsenic poisoning than most physicians. I think the law is clear, and I feel that the state should be able to go into these matters.”

“Mr. Britt is trying to try five or six cases here rather than one,” Jacobson responded, “and it is purely a matter of giving the defendant a fair trial.”

“Gentlemen, I think we are previewing right much that is yet to come, and properly so,” said the judge, going on to allow Britt to proceed with evidence of the earlier deaths.

The jury returned to hear Margie Lee Pittman describe how she had hired Velma to look after her mother and how her father had become sick soon afterward.

“I stood over him when he was sick on the potty chair because he was too weak to go to the bathroom,” she said. “I wiped his head from sweat pouring out all over him. He would groan, and if you had been in the yard you could have heard him, it was so hard. Daddy was the kind that went, ‘Oh me, oh me.’”