Death Sentence (28 page)

“Didn’t you tell us earlier that your whole purpose was to make him sick so that you could cash the check and pay the bank before he got well?”

“I vaguely remember what I said about that,” she said uncertainly, glancing at Jacobson.

“Now you say he was getting well. Weren’t you afraid to cash the check?”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“You cashed the check because you knew there was no recovery to be had for him at that time, did you not?” Britt practically shouted, his voice filled with righteous anger.

“No, sir, I did not,” she said, her own anger flashing. Britt asked when she had returned to Lumberton that day to pick up her prescription at Eckerd’s, and Velma said it was about three-thirty or four.

“Did you buy any more poison then?”

“No, I did not,” she said indignantly.

“Well, it was within four hours of Mr. Taylor going to the hospital for the final visit, wasn’t it?” Britt said, knowing he was antagonizing her.

“Approximately,” Velma replied, glaring at him.

“When you got back home, was he sick?”

“He seemed about the same as when I left.”

“When did this sudden onset of violent sickness take place?”

“I would say around seven o’clock.”

“Had he eaten the oyster stew at that time?”

“Yes.”

“You fixed that, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“As soon as he ate the oyster stew, then he really started getting sick, didn’t he?”

“No, sir, he did not,” Velma answered sharply, her disdain for Britt plain in her expression. “In fact, he did not vomit anymore at all from the time I got back from Lumberton with my medicine and oysters. He never did vomit anymore. He had diarrhea, but he didn’t vomit.”

Velma said that Stuart was taken to the hospital about eight-thirty that evening and that she was under the influence when she followed the ambulance there, driving his truck.

“The truth of the matter was that you just simply did not get under the influence of any drug until after Mr. Taylor died, did you?” Britt demanded.

“No, sir, that is not true.”

Ronnie thought his mother looked as if she might spring off the stand and throttle Britt, which was just what Britt wanted the jurors to see, he knew. Clearly, nothing Ronnie said to her the day before had the slightest effect.

Britt took Velma back again to her first interview with the police on March 10.

“You had denied any knowledge or complicity in the death of five people, had you not?”

“I sure did—” Velma said, then caught herself, “—not in five people.”

“Four people?”

“No, sir,” she said challengingly.

“How many?”

“One was all that was mentioned.”

“You knew it was going to lead to more people, didn’t you?”

“No, sir, I did not.”

“You knew that things were closing in on you, didn’t you?”

Her expression remained defiant. “No, sir, I did not.”

“Isn’t that why you started to take all those pills and do away with yourself?”

“I did take them with me to work on Sunday night, and I did think about doing it but I did not—”

“Do you remember telling them, ‘If I had done that, nobody would ever know what had happened except you and me’?”

“No, sir.”

“No further questions,” Britt said disdainfully.

Velma had performed no better than she had the day before, had appeared no more sympathetic or remorseful. She despised Britt so much that she couldn’t keep from responding with anger and scorn no matter how important it was to saving her life. Later, she would say that she had wanted to hit him.

“Is there further evidence for the defendant?” Judge McKinnon asked after Velma had made her way back to her seat.

“Nothing further,” Jacobson said dejectedly.

“Any further evidence for the state?”

“Yes,” said Britt, calling Alf Parnell in rebuttal. Had Velma said anything to him about the pills Ronnie had taken from his mother?

They had been talking after Velma had given her statements, Parnell said, when Velma mentioned that she had taken the pills to work the night before with the intention of taking all of them, but she couldn’t get up nerve enough to do it.

“She said she knew she was not ready to leave the world at this time.”

“Did she say anything about what would have happened to this case had she had nerve enough to do that?”

“She said that if she had taken the pills that the three of us would be the only ones that really knew what happened.”

“The state rests,” Britt said, and McKinnon called the lawyers to the bench, then asked the jury to step out.

After denying Jacobson’s standard motion for dismissal, the judge said he wanted to go over the instructions he would give the jury. Jacobson asked that the jury be allowed to consider verdicts of guilty to second-degree murder and not guilty by reason of insanity in addition to guilty of first-degree murder and not guilty. The judge was willing to allow second-degree and skeptical on not guilty by reason of insanity, as Jacobson had expected he would be.

“Do you care to be heard?” he asked.

Jacobson said he realized that three doctors had testified that she wasn’t insane and knew right from wrong. “I feel that just by the very reason that we have had some testimony that she was under the care of a psychiatrist, that she had a mental illness or an emotional problem that would be enough for the court to consider instructing on it.”

Britt countered that the burden was on the defense to prove insanity and all of the expert witnesses had testified to the contrary.

“I agree,” said the judge. “There is no evidence of insanity.”

He would, however, allow the jury to consider self-induced intoxication as a factor negating intent for a verdict of second-degree murder.

After a recess, Bob Jacobson began his final argument talking about the verdicts the jury could render.

“I am not one to hide anything from you,” he said. “You have heard all the evidence. It is all here—every bit of it. Mrs. Barfield has testified that she put Terro ant poison in Stuart Taylor’s tea and beer, so technically you have got guilty of first-degree murder or guilty of second-degree murder because you can’t consider insanity anymore.

“What my purpose here right now is to convince you that Mrs. Barfield is guilty of second-degree murder, and I want you to give consideration to all the evidence.”

He went on to explain reasonable doubt and the elements of first-degree murder. “But the state must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant intended to kill Stuart Taylor,” he told them.

“Now, you have heard evidence of other crimes. You are not convicting her of five different murders. If you convict her of first-degree murder, it is one murder, but I submit to you that you should convict her, if at all, on second-degree murder because she didn’t intend to do it.”

The judge would instruct them about how drug intoxication and mental illness could negate intent, he said.

“In other words, in simple terms we are saying that you should consider her mental condition and you should consider her use of drugs in determining a specific intent to kill. We are submitting to you that because of these conditions she could not form that intent to kill Stuart Taylor.”

The jurors should consider Velma’s mental condition and drug abuse in two ways, Jacobson contended, first to determine if she had an ability to form an intent to kill, and second whether she was too intoxicated to understand what she was doing, thereby making intent impossible. In either case, he pointed out, she would be guilty of second-degree murder, not first-degree.

Jacobson summarized the testimony about Velma’s long drug abuse and mental instability, noting that she took the drugs to cope, but the more she took, the less she was able to cope.

“These things that I have gone over have been to convince you that you should be convinced to a moral certainty that she is guilty of every element of first-degree murder before you can convict her. Review the evidence. Discuss it. Ask yourselves, ‘Am I fully satisfied? Is there a reasonable doubt?’ If you give consideration to the evidence that the defendant has presented, I believe you will find that this woman did not intend to kill Stuart Taylor. Thank you.”

Jacobson had begun his argument so late that Britt had figured he wouldn’t have to present his until the next session of court. But Jacobson had spoken for only about thirty minutes, and it was only four-thirty. Suddenly, Britt found himself having to present his case. He rose slowly, his suit coat unbuttoned. He checked his watch and turned to the jury.

“The defense counsel has been very brief, and I promise you I am not going to trespass on your time one minute longer than is necessary either,” he said. “I won’t talk past five o’clock.”

The reason Jacobson had been so brief, he said, was simple. He suddenly whirled and pointed a long arm and accusing finger at Velma. “There is no doubt whatsoever that that woman sitting right there,” he said, his voice rising dramatically, “is guilty of murder in the first degree!”

The crucial question in this case, he said, was intent, and that was why he had introduced the evidence of the others Velma had poisoned.

“Now, you know it’s going to be very easy to say, ‘My goodness, let’s don’t talk about those other cases. We are only trying this case concerning Stuart Taylor.’ Let me say this. Those other cases should be uppermost in your mind because those other cases demonstrate without any doubt that she knew precisely what she was doing when she put the poison in his beer and tea.

“She now says, ‘I didn’t mean to do it.’ Well, isn’t that just a little bit silly, ladies and gentlemen? Didn’t mean to do it, when we know from the evidence that just six short months before, she had done precisely the same thing to John Henry Lee?”

And before that to Dollie Edwards and her own mother.

“I say to you that ordinary intelligence and ordinary experience tell you that someone who would commit these kinds of horrendous crimes over and over and over again knows precisely what she is doing each time she does it.”

He briefly reviewed the evidence before moving on to Velma’s mental condition. “There are people out there with all kinds of infirmities, people with all kinds of hang-ups and problems. But if you start giving everybody with some kind of hang-up or little personality problem a license to start killing, we might as well hang it up because it is going to be a mighty chaotic society. The law doesn’t intend that.”

If the jury bought Velma’s contention that she was too drugged to know what she was doing when she gave poison to Stuart, they would have to believe her as a person, he said.

“You observed her there on the witness stand. I suggest to you it was a cold, hard woman, a woman who was calculating and cunning. Did you see that Terro ant poison when it got passed around, and the little skull and crossbones on the back? She knew what that stuff would do.

“She tells you now, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to do it. I had all that nasty old stuff in me, and I just did it and didn’t know about it.’ Is that consistent with what Dr. Baker tells you? Of course it’s not.”

Velma, he said, was a master of deception who could give poison to people, pretend to care for them, and console their families without anybody becoming suspicious.

“She was over there in the house with Stuart Taylor while he was puking his guts out, and she was standing there watching the whole time knowing what she had done. I suggest to you that Stuart Taylor’s life could have been saved if some doctor could have given him British antilewisite. Right there she had the key to his life, but she intended to kill Stuart Taylor, ladies and gentlemen, because she sat on that information.”

She knew that arsenic poisoning would not show up in autopsies and thought she was home free, he said. But Stuart’s death had been different from the others. He was younger and in better health, and his family and the doctors couldn’t understand why he had died. “And that’s when the medical experts got into it, and the long arm of justice got into it, and the truth finally came to the surface.”

Her motive, he said, was simple: to get money to satisfy her craving for drugs.

“No wonder she wants and craves and needs drugs to allay anxiety. No wonder she needs those to have lived with the deaths she has lived with for the last seven or eight years. Who wouldn’t?”

Britt checked his watch.

“I told you I would quit at five, and I will. Your job is a very simple one—to return a verdict.” The word verdict, he explained, was derived from Latin—veritas, truth; dictum, speak.

“That’s all the state of North Carolina wants you to do is to render a verdict, to speak the truth, and the verdict that speaks the truth is guilty. I am asking you to find her guilty of murder in the first degree.”

Not one of his better arguments, Britt thought later, but he had no concern about its effect. That Velma would be found guilty of first-degree murder was a foregone conclusion. He would save his fire for the sentencing argument.

As Britt turned back to the prosecution table, Velma, a smirk on her face, raised her hands in silent applause. None of the jurors could have missed it, and Bob Jacobson’s spirits suddenly bottomed. What little hope he’d had for a verdict of second-degree murder suddenly dissipated because of a single, stupid act.