Gang Mom (16 page)

“Hey, is Mary there?”

“Hold on,” said a voice, probably her husband John, who had answered.

“Hello?” said Mary.

“Hi,” said Lisa Fentress. And then she giggled. “Did you hear what happened?” She giggled some more. “Did you hear what happened?”

“Yeah, and I don’t think it’s very f—ing funny either,” Mary answered dryly.

“Neither do I,” said Lisa, sobering up. “Like, what happened?”

“All I know is Beau is sitting in custody.”

“Why? What for?”

“I don’t know,” Mary answered suspiciously. “They won’t tell me.”

“That’s f—ing up, ’cause he …”

“What did they ask you?”

Mary still thought it was Lisa who had turned Beau in but she wanted to pump her to see what she had given the police.

“They asked me who was in the car and I was like, ‘I don’t know. I was just giving directions.’ And they asked, ‘Well, was Beau Flynn in the car?’ And I said, ‘I never said that.’ And they’re like, ‘Why do you hang out with people like that?’ I’m like, ‘Beau’s turning his f—ing life around and he’s going to college and stuff.’ And they’re like, ‘Well, then, why was he in the car?’ And I go, ‘I never said he was in the car. I want my lawyer!’ And they took me, handcuffed me and stuff, took me to City Hall and they arrested me. And then they took me back to school and they might press charges for stealing a car.”

“Were you in the car?”

“Kind of.”

“Just giving them directions?”

“Yeah.”

“Just don’t say anything.”

“I know, I was giving directions. I didn’t really look at him. I was just giving directions. On how to get to Spencer Butte Middle School.”

“Okay.”

“I’m gonna sue ’em. They f—ing …”

Mary barely heard the rest of what Lisa said, so keen was her anxiety about what was happening to Beau. It was anxiety well-placed.

Remanded to the custody of juvenile court, Beau was quickly charged with conspiracy to commit burglary. Pending disposition of the charges, he was sent back to MacLaren for violating his parole. He would eventually be tried and convicted as an adult and sentenced to five years in the state penitentiary. He would finally have to do hard time for his crimes.

To Michaud, murder was the ultimate game. And he was losing it. Mary Thompson’s hold over those kids was allowing her to get away with murder. It wasn’t so much that he liked Aaron Iturra, though his mother seemed to be a good person. And while it would be nice to effect an arrest because it might help Janyce sleep better at night, that wasn’t the real reason he wanted to get Mary.

Michaud just hated,
hated
, any criminal who thought she was smarter than he was. And he had one more shot to show Mary who was smarter. If he didn’t win, she would get away with murder.

I better not blow it
, he thought.
I better be right that we find out what she’s really like when we listen in
.

At first Mary Thompson did suspect that it was Lisa Fentress who was the snitch, but over the next month, as her paranoia waxed and waned, her suspicions fell on other members of the gang. Such was her feeling that she was above the law that she never once suspected the truth. The proof of that was that she kept talking and Michaud kept listening.

By February, after the wire had been in place a month, Michaud figured he’d heard enough to get an indictment for aggravated murder, that is, Mary Thompson had caused Aaron Iturra’s death through her actions. It wasn’t murder one, but it was as close as he could get, and with a conviction, she would go to jail for life. After consulting with Skelton, the decision was made to conclude the tap, arrest Mary and present their evidence at trial. But first the evidence would be secretly presented before a grand jury to secure an indictment.

That turned out to be just a formality; the grand jury came back with the indictment immediately.

The night before her arrest, Michaud once more stood on the porch of his house. It was winter now and it had been raining for weeks. Usually, he found something soothing about the rain. It was never too cold in the Willamette River Valley and when it rained, it was a tranquil time.

As he sipped his martini, Michaud felt anything but tranquil. He wondered if he’d done all that he could to secure a conviction. Nothing was ever certain with a jury. He was watching the Simpson case down in Los Angeles with interest because he had worked before with Marcia Clark and Mark Fuhrman and wasn’t overly impressed with either. And there was a case where they had Simpson open and shut, touchdown, and he could certainly see a way they could screw things up. He just hoped that he was not being overconfident, that he had done his job.

The wiretaps after the car chase—another parallel to Simpson, but the Eugene version was high-speed—had shown that Mary Thompson had engaged in a criminal conspiracy to prey on the people of Eugene. Drug deals, burglaries, gun deals, it was all part of the same pattern of criminal behavior that had led Michaud to form his theory that Beau and Mary were more than mother and son: they were business partners.

Their gang had preyed on Eugene’s citizens, which he felt accounted for the increase in selected categories of crime. It was Michaud’s hope that with her off the street, the numbers would start going down. But the prize here wasn’t in bringing down a racketeering gangster so much as it was bringing down a cold-blooded murderer.

Not too far away, Mary Thompson was settling into bed with her husband John. She figured she had done all that she could to obscure her participation in the murder of Aaron Iturra and the criminal activities of the 74 Hoover Crips. She believed that since nothing had happened to her so far, nothing would. Well, maybe some sort of charge of obstructing justice, but nothing more serious than that.

No, she was beginning to feel optimistic about the future.

WOMAN CHARGED IN ITURRA MURDER

Mary Thompson, an outspoken critic of youth gangs, is charged with aggravated murder
.

On Friday, February 11, 1995, the headline of
The Register Guard
, Eugene’s leading paper, said it all. Mary had been arrested and charged in a grand jury indictment with aggravated murder, first degree burglary, first degree theft and six counts of hindering prosecution. She was remanded to Lane County Jail without bail, pending arraignment.

To the embarrassment of certain members of the Eugene Police Department, the article pointed out the following:

“Thompson … was generally looked upon by police, reporters and community leaders as a knowledgeable and outspoken opponent of gang activity. She frequently used the story of her own son’s path into gang life as a tool to discourage youngsters from criminal behavior while persuading parents that gangs aren’t just a big city problem. Her family’s story was told in a front-page story in
The Register Guard
in December 1993.”

Michaud put down the paper. It was still a long haul. With pre-trial motions and such, it could take a year or more before they went to trial. He picked up the paper again and gazed at Mary’s mug shot, which graced the article, and allowed himself the luxury of feeling just a little bit good.

In her cell at Lane County Jail, Mary Thompson was a celebrity. Mary basked in the good feelings toward her. She was “Gang Mom,” and the other prisoners gave her the respect they felt she was due. All except one.

She hated
Kristen Clooney
and Kristen hated her. Bunk mates, they were both big, bluff, domineering women. Kristen thought Mary got special treatment from the guards because of her celebrity status. And she hated the way Mary bragged, especially the way she made threats.

“If I’m convicted,” Mary boasted, “I’ll make Aaron’s mother dead too.”

As for the possibility of conviction, Mary remained optimistic, and why not? As 1995 dragged on, she saw O.J. Simpson acquitted with far more evidence than she figured the district attorney had on her. It was only a matter of time and she’d be on the street once again.

TWELVE

By the summer of 1996, Maya Iturra, Aaron’s sister, had attempted suicide by slashing her wrists. Maya felt that she was responsible for Aaron’s death.

After all, she had taken the call from Lisa Fentress and told her that Aaron was home. Had she not done that, her brother would still be alive, she reasoned.

A psychotherapist put Maya on anti-depression medication and her condition improved. She continued to go to therapy, as did her siblings, who had been left with tremendous reserves of unresolved feelings over Aaron’s death. This all put that much more pressure on Janyce to hold things together, which she did, while going to therapy herself.

Alternately, Janyce would feel that she had overcome the grief over her son’s death, only to plunge back into the dark abyss of depression. Up and down it went. But mid-June would see the trial of Mary Thompson and Janyce’s thoughts began to focus on one thing and one thing alone:

Revenge.

It had been Mary Thompson who brought this blight on her family and now, now, she wanted to see Mary Thompson get hers.

Across town, Jim Michaud was thinking along the same lines, though without that depth of feeling. While he, also, wanted Mary Thompson punished, he was too seasoned a product of the system to expect that would happen. Even if she were incarcerated for life, would that bring Aaron back? If he had it his way, she would go to the death chamber and have her veins filled with poison and die a slow, agonizing death. Again, reality intruded.

First, death by injection was looked at by the penal system as one of the more humane methods to put a murderer out. No pain. Just fall asleep and never wake up.

Second, and more important, because Mary was charged with
contributing
to Aaron’s death, that is, not actually having pulled the trigger herself, the best the state could hope for was a conviction on aggravated murder, which in Oregon was only punishable by life imprisonment. Other states had more restrictive laws where Mary could have been charged with murder one and faced death. Not Oregon.

Finally, Michaud was too pragmatic to expect that, no matter how good the state’s case was, a jury would automatically convict. The Simpson verdict was less than a year old and in everyone’s mind; it had proven that, however strong your case was, you could find a selected group of twelve morons who would choose to ignore what was right in front of them and opt for an innocent verdict.

With all these things in mind, Michaud, ever the idealist tilting at windmills, decided, with the approval of his superiors, to attend the trial and offer Skelton whatever support he might during the proceedings. It was a duty he was only too eager to perform because, above all else, Mary Thompson had violated the law, and to a lawman like Michaud, she had to be convicted, plain and simple.

As for Steve Skelton, he was the one who would be prosecuting the case on behalf of the state. Skelton always felt pressure when trying a big case, and on the “Gang Mom” case in particular, with all of its attendant publicity, he felt the pressure most acutely.

Mary Thompson was a significant threat to the community. She was a murderer who had yet to be convicted and if she wasn’t, he was afraid she would keep on killing to reach her criminal goals of maintaining her gang’s power. For that reason and that reason alone, he wanted to win.

Of course, there was pressure on the state to do a thoroughly professional job. The community was watching and if the media had its way, they’d be watching very closely. And with that kind of microscopic scrutiny, the state needed to win. To do that, they had to present a case without mistakes to the jury.

Skelton had an interesting way of trying cases. He tried them by memory. He may not have been “The Amazing Kreskin,” but he had a memory that allowed him to remember what people said, so he tended to keep a lot of facts in his head. In a case like “Gang Mom,” with thousands of pages of intercepts and police reports, he was close to having memorized all of it by the time the case came to trial.

He hoped that his memory would be good enough to construct a case that the jury would believe, and that Mary Thompson would be convicted.

JUNE 13, 1996

The trial of Mary Thompson on the charge of aggravated murder in the death of Aaron Benjamin Iturra began on a bright summer’s day. After a jury selection process that lasted three days, a jury of six men, six women and two alternates were seated to hear the case.

Sitting at the prosecution table to the left of Lane County Circuit Judge Lyle Velure was Steve Skelton. On the right, at the defense table, sat a prim, proper and bespectacled Mary Thompson. Next to her was Steve Chez, a noted Portland defense attorney she had retained to defend her against the state’s charges. Michaud sat in the back, listening to every word.

“The purpose of the opening statement,” Skelton explained to the jury, “is to outline the important facts of the case,” which he proceeded to do in short order. He outlined Mary’s involvement in the murder, from her requesting and sanctioning it, to helping Brown dispose of the murder weapon.

The 74 Hoover Crips, he explained, “were a very dangerous group of people,” perpetrating crimes on the citizens of Eugene, “and the leader of that group was Mary Louise Thompson. Now, the other purpose of the opening statement is to educate you on the law,” Skelton continued, explaining that once the state proved their case, the jury would have no alternative but to convict Mary Thompson of aggravated murder.

When it was his turn, Chez presented another view of the case. He argued forcefully that Thompson’s actions and motives were entirely misunderstood.

“Mary Thompson treated the gang members with kindness and respect. She was a positive source for these kids. If you didn’t know how to talk to them or know their language, there was no talking. She tried to be a positive force, but she had to have realistic goals,” Chez continued, explaining that the young people were “nobodies” in society’s eyes and that they overcompensated for their inferiority complexes by being “bad” and bragging about crimes that never took place. “There was no jumping-in ceremony,” he maintained.