Disturbed Ground (44 page)

This was not what the defense wanted the jury to hear.

Kevin Clymo edged into his cross-examination with a relaxed, casual tone, eventually asking, "Will sixty thirty-milligram tablets of Dalmane kill somebody?"

"I believe it will put them in a coma," Dr. Anthony replied. "I don't believe it will necessarily kill them."

"Dalmane has been reported as being one of the safest sedatives around, hasn't it?"

"That's its reputation."

"I believe at the prelim, you testified it would take hundreds of capsules to kill somebody."

"It could take as much as hundreds."

Here it was, the big punch for the jury.

"I asked how much that would be, if you poured out all of the white powder from the capsule and held it in your hands, and I believe you told me it would be the size of a softball, is that correct?"

"Yes, the amount of white fluffy powder you would end up with when you took a hundred or two hundred Dalmane and opened them all up, you would end up with a softball-size mass of powder."

Pleased with this victory, Clymo decided to push on. "Which is why, is it not, you told us that for all practical purposes, a massive overdose of drugs was ruled out in this case?"

The doctor saw his opportunity for clarification. "A massive dose of any
singular
drug was ruled out."

Clymo should have hoped the jury missed this distinction and moved on. Instead, he continued, "Ruled out because it would take such a huge quantity to kill somebody?"

"That's correct. But again, this is of any one substance. We are not talking about a combination of ingredients."

Belatedly, Clymo changed the subject.

The defense would later offer its own expert witness to refute Dr. Anthony's damaging opinions. But before letting him off the stand, Clymo extracted from Dr. Anthony another salient bit of testimony: When deprived of drink, alcoholics often turn to sedatives.

With no discernible cause of death in this case, Dalmane was the "smoking gun" and toxicologists were the ballistics experts. Besides James Beede and Dr. Anthony, the prosecution called two additional toxicologists, William Phillips from the Department of Justice toxicology lab, and Dr. Michael Peat of Chem West. Like Beede, both had tested the tissue homogenates. The problem was that the experts had different findings.

Why was it that only Phillips, of the DOJ, had found Dalmane in each of the seven bodies unearthed from Puente's yard?

The obvious answer was that only the DOJ had the ultra-sensitive, $875,000 tandem mass spectrometer, which could most precisely distinguish any drugs from the "background noise" found in decomposed tissue.

More than this, Phillips quickly emerged as an impeccable scientist who ran his lab with ironclad protocol, leaving the defense no opportunity to attack him as they had Beede. But as Phillips discussed radioimmunoassay, ion capture, and gas chromatography, some of the jurors seemed painfully bored. Was this scientific minutiae becoming too obscure for ordinary citizens?

As O'Mara's exhibits marched on toward two thousand, the XREM1ST nodded out. Spectators nudged one another. The court clerk sighed. The bailiff glared at him.

Finally, Judge Virga felt compelled to address this juror. After the others had been excused, Virga told him, "I've been concerned about your ability to pay proper attention," admonishing that both sides deserve an alert jury
.

"I've got a lot of things weighing on me, Your Honor," Gary Frost apologized. "I'm sure you're aware of them."

With Fort Ord shutting down, Frost's company had been transferred to Fort Lewis, Washington. His commander had asked if Frost could be excused so that he could go too. But Virga could find no legal reason to do so, despite that six alternate jurors were waiting in the wings. Now, if Frost really wanted to go, all he had to do was state that he was unable to concentrate, and Virga would have to excuse him.

The defense hated the thought of losing their "wild card." The Solomon case had proven that a Vietnam Vet could stand up to other jurors. And though Frost was a cutup and unpredictable, Clymo said they had their "fingers crossed" that the XREM1ST would
stay on.

Frost assured the judge that he felt competent to continue, and the defense attorneys breathed a sigh of relief.

It was now May, and after months of testimony and seemingly endless exhibits, everyone seemed weary. The joviality had diminished, occasional jokes seemed strained. The jury had been here since February, laboring to decipher accents, to grasp scientific terms, trying to give fair weight to the words of carpet cleaners and cardiologists, bankers and boozers.

During these months, the jurors, attorneys, even the judge and the defendant had come down with colds and flu. Birthdays and anniversaries had passed. At least one grandchild had been born, and Senior Bailiff Bill Jackson had passed away.

By now, the jurors had every reason to feel overburdened by the load the justice system was putting on them, and to resent the fact that their "civic duty" had eaten up half the year. At breaks, most made ritual pilgrimages for coffee, and grumblings about trying to stay awake increased. But, except for the XREM1ST, none dozed.

Despite months of testimony, the jury would never hear the whole story because reasons of law and strategy limited what reached their ears. For instance, deciding it wasn't relevant and would only complicate matters, John O'Mara wouldn't even mention Visine.

And he found himself in a quandary over Michelle Crowl. He knew she was a liar and a druggie, but he wanted to put her on the stand anyway. She had a great story to tell the jury, something no one else could say. But now he got wind of something rotten: The defense was ready to have Growl's father testify that she was the biggest liar he'd ever met.

Brenda
Trujillo was a liar and a junkie, too, but at least part of her story had corroboration. Not so Michelle Crowl. And O'Mara remembered one time that she'd come into his office so hopped up on drugs, he could almost hear her brain sizzling.

Finally, the prosecutor decided (to the great disappointment of the defense) that it was pointless to call her to the stand. The jury would never hear about Puente's jailhouse chats. They would never hear that Puente had virtually confessed. They wouldn’t hear that she’d said that she was surprised "they linked Everson Gillmouth to the others," that she'd
"suppressed their breathing" by putting drugs in their drinks, and that Bert Montoya "didn't know any better" than to help her bury bodies.

Except for the scant references allowed by the court, O'Mara could
scarcely squeeze in any mention of Puente's prior record. The victims of her 1981-1982 thefts were all dead, the testimonies of others precluded. Resigned, O'Mara said with a shrug, "It'll be very clean on appeal."

Even as the prosecution's case turned away from the seven bodies in the yard toward the two remaining counts—Ruth Munroe and Everson Gillmouth—even as O'Mara approached his last two dozen witnesses, testimonies were chopped to a minimum. And
hearsay
was the legal ax that cut them off.

A former friend of Munroe's, Nadine Nash, was too ill to come to court, so the attorneys agreed to have her testimony from the preliminary hearing read aloud—with significant deletions. The jury heard that Nash and Munroe had been friends for forty years, and that, a few weeks before her death, Munroe had stopped by Nash's home. They heard that during this visit Munroe had shown Nash "quite a lot" of money in her purse, saying it was $1,100 for the restaurant business she and Dorothea had started.

But the jury would not hear that Munroe had also said she had six thousand dollars in the trunk of her car—a stronger motive, perhaps, for murder.

Hearsay
also cut short the testimony of little Dee Dee McKinnon. The jurors heard Dee Dee explain that she was Ruth Munroe's hairdresser, and that the Sunday before Munroe's death, she'd fixed Ruth's hair as usual. They heard that Munroe had looked pale. "She was sick. She didn't feel well," Dee Dee said, hinting at the issue from every allowable angle. "She told me she felt awful. She didn't know why she was sick."

That was about all Dee Dee was permitted to say, and it bothered her that she couldn't share the significant fact that Munroe had also said, "Dorothea gave me a drink last night, and I don't remember anything else. I don't remember eating dinner, I don't remember going to bed."

To Dee Dee, Ruth had seemed shaken, bewildered. And after her appointment, the hairdresser had watched Ruth go downstairs and get into the car where Dorothea Puente was waiting.

For Ruth's sake, she wished she'd been allowed to tell this to the jury. But who knows whether it would have seemed as important to them as it seemed to her.

That final Sunday at the beauty shop was described in court by Camie Lombardo, another former friend of Munroe's. Camie had entered the shop just as Munroe was paying to leave, and she noticed immediately that Ruth looked drawn and pale. "She just looked ill," Camie told the jury. "She was kinda crying a little bit."

To Camie's friendly greeting, Munroe had responded with grim, prophetic words. "I can't talk to you now, Camie. I'm so sick,
I feel like I'm going to die."

Like Judy Moise, Ruth Munroe's children had been won over by John O'Mara. The Clausen family had been bitter about George Williamson abandoning this case after the prelim. But O'Mara wasn't just another attorney in the rotation, they discovered; he'd been Williamson's
boss.

While the Clausen family was feeling more confident about O'Mara, he was feeling more disturbed about them. First, there was that whole codeine business, all of them
insisting
at the prelim that Munroe was allergic to it, when she was actually allergic to penicillin. And they'd all maintained that their mother would never have committed suicide—but if they'd been so sure about that, why hadn't they screamed bloody murder back in 1982?

To O'Mara, the Munroe case—the only one for which there had been a prompt autopsy—was looking shakier all the time. It hadn't been investigated properly in 1982, and, to his disgust, the reinvestigation in 1988 and 1989 had only muddied the waters. The defense had plenty to work with. So, when O'Mara called the Clausens to the stand, he kept their testimonies short and to the point.

William Clausen's hairline was beginning to retreat, but he still looked strong and feisty. When asked to identify Dorothea Puente, he shot her a look of complete distaste. He then described his mother's friendship with Puente, their budding restaurant business, and how he'd helped her move into 1426 F Street.

His mother’s room? The bedroom off the kitchen—the one everyone now knew as the "haunted room."

"How would you describe her mental outlook when she first moved in?" O'Mara asked.

"Looking forward to a companion. She didn't want to live alone, that's why she moved in there."

When O'Mara asked if there had been some change in Munroe's demeanor, Clausen said that, about four days before her death, he'd
noticed that "she looked tired." He added, "I checked on her every night before 1 went home from work."

On this occasion, "She had a drink in her hand. And that was odd. Mom was always energetic, and that day she was just sitting on the end of the couch with a drink. Well, I know my mom didn't drink, and I questioned her about it. She said it was just a drink that Dorothea had fixed her. Creme de menthe. And at that time, I didn't know that creme de menthe was alcohol." (That was easy to believe. He pronounced the drink "cream de mint.")

This was the only time that he'd seen his mother with a drink. But he saw her condition worsen.

Clausen's voice tightened as he turned to the night of the April 27 "when I saw her the last time."

"Where did you find her on that occasion?" O'Mara asked softly.

"In the bedroom."