Hangman (19 page)

“How far did they go?”

“The works,” said Maddy. “Interviews conducted so they planted ideas. No record of troubling statements. Jumping to conclusions and never looking back.”

“Was Haddon arrested?”

“Not right away. First, they tried to smoke him out with a false profile. The FBI sent a profiler to assess the crime. He toured the murder site and re-enacted the killing. His profile predicted that the perp would be an older, lazy, unintelligent man who lacked self-esteem, was physically disfigured, and had a history of arson and voyeurism.”

“Doesn’t sound like Haddon.”

“Not by a mile. So what investigators did was doctor the profile for a news release. The strategy was to make it seem as if Peter fit Anna’s killer to a T, in the hope that he would panic and give himself away. No one considered the prejudicial effect of the ruse. Tailoring the false profile to fit him planted certainty of Peter’s guilt in the minds of civilian witnesses. And in the minds of potential jurors too.”

“Did he spook?”

“No. The people who spooked were the detectives. The FBI told them to allow two or three weeks for the killer’s fear to fester. But when there was no reaction within a few days, Peter was arrested.”

“Why jump the gun?”

Justin jumped in. “The excuse I was offered years later was this: ‘Well, he didn’t come running in to say, “Here I am. I confess,” did he?’”

“And now we know why, don’t we?” said Maddy.

“Was Haddon grilled?”

“And how,” said the detective. “All Homicide had was a circumstantial case. The window of opportunity and a few hairs and fibers. The hairs and fibers matched, but that wasn’t conclusive. Other hairs and fibers could match too. What they lacked to cinch the noose was a confession.”

A flurry of waiter activity whisked away the soup bowls, replacing them with the main course, a medley of
fruits de mer.
The conversation slowed as the four ate seafood, to the accompaniment of the clatter of cutlery on china. As the ship cruised up Puget Sound, past Kitsap Peninsula and Whidbey Island, isolated lights slipped by the portholes. Ahead, beyond Admiralty Inlet, stretched the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

“Interrogation wrung no confession from Peter. He steadfastly maintained he was innocent,” said Maddy. “Every comment he made, of course, became suspect. Showing too much emotion or curiosity revealed guilt. Too little did the same.

“By then, news of his arrest saturated the media. Detectives were forced to justify their conviction, so they began cobbling a case around Peter. A cop driving the paddy wagon swore he overheard Peter admit to someone in back, ‘I’m in trouble if they find out I had sex with an underage girl.’”

“How old was Haddon?”

“At the time of the crime?”

“Yes.”

“Twenty-one.”

“Old enough to hang,” added Justin.

“What sealed his fate,” Maddy said, “was the word of two snitches. The first to come out of the woodwork was a man charged with robbery who was locked in the cell with Peter on the night of his arrest. He ratted on him in exchange for leniency. His cellmate, the snitch swore, became distraught that night and, in a fit of agonizing over his plight, blurted out, ‘Fuck, man. I killed that little girl.’”

Zinc shook his head. “I don’t trust rats.”

“The rat passed a polygraph.”

“I’m leery of them too.”

“So am I,” said Maddy.

“And the other snitch?”

“He emerged the following day. A deal was struck to reduce his wounding charge after he swore he heard Peter confess through his cell wall.”

“The
same
confession?”

“Yes. The night of Peter’s arrest. The second rat was jailed next to him and the first snitch.”

“The same words?”

“Almost. A slight variation. In his version, what Peter wailed was ‘Fuck, man. I did it. I killed that little girl.’”

“And the polygraph?”

“It didn’t catch him either. That was enough for Homicide,” Maddy wrapped up. “Detectives had motive: lust for underage girls. Means: the car with the same fibers as those found on Anna’s clothes. And opportunity: the 4:15 to 4:35 window.

“Peter was charged with murder.

“The next year, 1984, he stood trial.”

*    *    *

“The trial was an eye-opener,” Justin said. “I sat through it as a journalism student. The battle between the prosecution and the defense was more like a boxing match than a solemn inquiry into the guilt or innocence of a man. The hard-edged partisanship of the lawyers was scary. ‘Fight him every inch of the way.’ ‘Don’t let that sleazebag cuddle up to you in front of the jury.’ ‘Force him to call witnesses so we can gut them alive.’ Those were comments I overheard from the state attorney.”

“My dad was a trial lawyer,” Alex said. “That was always a concern. How does an attorney vigorously prosecute an accused in an adversary system without overstepping the boundary of fairness to him? His term for the answer was ‘noble cause corruption.’ The belief that it is okay to distort justice because of the moral rightness of convicting someone like Haddon.”

“An honest lawyer?”

“There are a few,” she said.

“The prosecutor danced circles around Peter’s attorney. He had an answer for everything. The defense attacked the match between the fibers found in Peter’s car and those on Anna’s clothes. The fibers were simply there. No
common
source was known. Something shedding, like say a rug in Peter’s car. Given the close proximity of both homes, the wind could have transferred the airborne fibers of unknown origin to Peter’s car and to Anna’s clothes. Or maybe they were tracked about by someone they had in common, like the postman.

“The prosecutor’s answer was Anna’s underwear. How did the fibers end up there? Because she was raped on a blanket from the trunk of Peter’s car? A blanket he got rid of after she was dead?”

“That is more likely,” Zinc said.

“I agree.”

“And then there was the similar hair.”

“That didn’t help,” Justin said.

“But without the confession, there was no smoking gun.”

“The defense attacked the snitches as rats without moral constraints. They concocted that bogus confession to buy leniency. Their brazen performances on the stand should not be believed.

“The prosecutor’s answer was that the worst liar in the world can still tell the truth. The fact that both men concurred in what they heard, the fact that both statements weren’t identical, the fact that the confession echoed Peter’s admission of underage sex overheard in the paddy wagon—these were sound reasons to accept the testimony given under oath. Did Peter’s front collapse that first night in jail? Was it guilt that forced him to blurt out the confession?

“As the trial ground on, Peter seemed to slip into full-blown paranoia. All of it, we now know, was justified. By the time he took the stand in his own defense, he was a twitchy wreck of a man.”

“His alibi sank?”

“It didn’t hold water. No one remembered him buying food or gas. He could have returned home by 4:15. Then, if that wasn’t bad enough, Peter’s lawyer made a blunder that torpedoed his client. He called a backup defense of insanity.”

“The fool,” said Zinc.

“You’ve seen that done up north?”

“We, too, have dithering lawyers who can’t make up their minds. They hedge their bets by splitting the defense. ‘My client didn’t do it. But if he did do it, he was insane.’”

“Mugwumps,” said Alex. “That’s what my dad called them. Their mug’s on one side of the fence and their wump’s on the other.”

The four shared a laugh.

“Dr. Jupp is notorious as a shrink who loves the limelight. The defense can always count on him,” Justin said.

“Peter’s lawyer called Jupp,” Maddy added.

“The psychiatrist testified that Peter was schizophrenic,” Justin continued. “He could have raped and killed Anna in a delusionary fugue, and later repressed all memory of what he had done. By leading evidence of insanity, Peter’s attorney not only conveyed the message that he was acting for a dangerous man, but he also made it look like he didn’t believe his client’s alibi. It struck observers as passing strange that a defense of insanity would be led for an accused who hadn’t committed the underlying murder.

“So in the end, what began as a case of junk evidence against Peter turned into a courtroom battle dressed up in enough legal theatrics to overcome its basic weaknesses. All that stood between Peter and the hangman’s noose was the common sense of twelve jurors. His life depended on their being true to the oath they took, and not playing out personal agendas in the jury room.”

A man about thirty, with blond hair and bleary eyes, approached their table from the other side of the dining room.

“Am I interrupting?”

“No,” Justin replied. “Everybody, meet my brother, Ethan Shaw.”

Zinc, Alex and Maddy acknowledged him. One by one, the three introduced themselves.

“Crime isn’t his field, so I doubt you’ve crossed swords, but Ethan is a Vancouver lawyer,” Justin told Zinc.

“I practice with a criminal lawyer,” the young man said. He pointed back at the table he had left, where a tough-looking fellow about the same age and wearing barrister’s robes studied them. “Jeff Kline. Know him?”

“No,” said Zinc. “But then, I don’t get into court much these days.”

“Join us?” Alex offered.

Ethan shook his head. “Actually, I came to spirit Justin away. Everyone’s talking about the hangman word game. Jeff and I were discussing Peter Haddon. I told him Justin was the reporter who blew the whistle, so Jeff wants to hear the story from him.” He turned to his brother. “How about dessert?”

“Go,” said Maddy. “We have files to discuss.”

“Mind if I tag along?” Alex asked.

She gave Zinc a look that said, Here’s your chance to swing. If you love me, you must love me for
me.

“Be my guest,” Ethan said, crooking out his arm.

As Alex rose to be escorted away, Zinc noticed two things about the unsteady lawyer. One was the smell of Scotch wafting from him. The other was the twitch that winked one eye.

Gunslinger

Vancouver

Tonight

I watched them come toward me, the three of them: my law associate, Ethan; a male who was surely his brother; and a woman who meant the Mountie in red was the luckiest guy on board. They weaved through a sea of tables from him to me, which masked the fact that my office partner couldn’t walk a straight line. Lucky for Ethan he had the beauty on his arm, for if not he might have ended up on someone’s plate. That was six days ago, just before the onboard hanging that drew me into the case, which has resulted in the Hangman’s stalking me tonight.

“Ditch him,” I said as the trio reached my table. “He’s too young for a fine-looking, grown-up babe like you.”

“If I don’t have to change his diapers, no man is too young for me.”

“Too old and you end up changing diapers too.”

She laughed.

I grinned.

It was a good start.

I scare most women.

They see me as a threat.

So it was refreshing to see her look me straight in the eye.

“You look Ethan’s age.”

“I am,” I said.

“Which makes you the pot to his kettle, right?”

She was quick.

I like ballsy women.

“Alex Hunt,” Ethan said, “meet Jeff Kline. Jeff, this is Alex. And this is my brother, Justin.”

The man I had asked Ethan to bring over held out his paw. As we shook, I wondered if this was the hand that had scrawled the hangman puzzle.

“Sit down,” I said.

They each took a seat, and as if on cue, dessert arrived. It was some puffed concoction smothered with fruit and sauce.

“Pavlova,” said Alex.

“Really,” I replied.

“For the Russian ballerina.”

“Oh,” I said. Believe me, you wouldn’t catch me dead at one of those. Girls in fluffy miniskirts and guys in tight pants showing off their stones.

“She was the ballerina known for
The Dying Swan.
If I’m not mistaken, early last century, when Pavlova toured Australia and New Zealand, a chef down under created this for her.”

“You learn something every day,” I said.

A forkful of pavlova slipped down my barbarian’s throat. It tasted like a ballerina’s tutu. Give me an apple pie any day.

Ethan was getting miffed at me for playing cutesy with his date. “I told Justin you wanted to hear what he did after Haddon hung.”

“Hanged,” I said.

Ethan’s face twitched.

“Hang a coat on a hook and the coat is hung. Hang a man on a gallows and the man is hanged. Unless he is as well-endowed as Pavlova’s ballet partners. Then you can properly say he’s hung, too.”

Alex chuckled.

Classy chick.

One of those women who can take on both the high and the low.

“You learn something every day,” Ethan responded coldly.

I didn’t want to do it—hey, he and I have stood together for years—but the opening Ethan gave me was too good to let close. Not only did I slip it to Alex that I was in her league, but if Justin Whitfield was the Hangman, here was my chance to let him know I was his kind of lawyer.

“That’s why you don’t walk under ladders.”

“What is?” Alex said.

“Hanging,” I replied.

“I don’t get the connection.”

“In the early days of hanging cons on Tyburn Hill in London, the condemned climbed a ladder to the noose and was ‘turned off’ to strangle. The body was left to hang for an hour under the ladder. That’s why we think it unlucky to walk under one today.”

“You know a lot about hanging,” Justin said.

He gave me that scrutinizing stare that reporters have copyrighted.

“The Hangman fascinates me.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because hanging is how the common law has always exacted judicial retribution. Pharaoh hanged his baker, the Bible says. It also mentions a gallows fifty cubits high. The gallows was brought to Britain by Anglo-Saxon invaders. It’s fair to say the cross and the noose took hold at the same time. The Hangman goes to a great deal of trouble to hang his victims. When I ask myself why, the answer I get is biblical retribution. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. The Hangman isn’t a killer in the usual sense—he’s an executioner on a mission. What this Hangman is doing is what hangmen have always done: He’s punishing the guilty, and he’s deterring those who might transgress by driving home the consequences of not toeing the line.”

Think about that, I thought.

If you’re the Hangman, Justin, am I not the gunslinger you want if the cops bust you?

One who
understands?

“You’re mixing metaphors, Jeff.”

It was Alex speaking.

She was turning the tables on me for making Ethan look ungrammatical.

“How so?” I asked.

“‘Towing the line.’ You can’t mix driving a car with towing a barge. That’s like saying, ‘The president will put the ship of state on its feet.’ You’re mixing wheels and feet.”

I grinned. “Alex, you’re the lowest snake in the grass who ever stabbed a man in the back.”

“See,” she said. “You know better.”

“Actually, it’s you who got it wrong.”

“Oh? How so?”

“A mixed metaphor is the use in the same expression of two or more metaphors that are illogical in combination, agreed?”

“Yes,” she said.

“To ‘drive’ can mean to operate a car. But it can also mean to send by force, agreed?”

“I suppose.”

“When a judge condemns a convict to hang, what he says at the close of the sentence is this: ‘And may God have mercy on your soul.’ God lives in heaven, and He’s our Maker, so heaven is where a soul comes from and where, if God has mercy, it goes ‘home.’ Thus when a hangman breaks a convict’s neck, it can literally be said that the condemned is ‘driven home.’”

Justin rolled his eyes. “God save us from lawyers,” he groaned.

“And you’re in trouble on another front,” I added. “Somewhere along the way, you picked up the expression ‘to toe the line’ and wrongly fixed it in your mind as ‘to tow the line.’ It’s T-O-E, not T-O-W. So while we both agree that ‘to toe the line’ means to conform strictly with a rule or law, you see the image of that metaphor as a person towing a barge along a straight and narrow canal with a tow line over her shoulder as she trudges the towpath alongside the water.”

“I’m wrong?” said Alex.

“The origin of that phrase is this. The hangman on a British gallows chalked a line on the trapdoors as a guide to where the condemned should stand. Cons who did as they were told ‘toed the line.’ But cons who roughed up and refused to go peacefully were
driven home
, so to speak, strapped to a board.

“Sorry, Alex, but either way you lose. Both of my supposedly ‘mixed’ metaphors relate to hanging.”

“You learn something every day,” she said, adding her lesson to Ethan’s and mine.

“That’s how it’s done,” I said, with a meaningful wink at Justin. “Before your toe is on the line, / It’s time to call for Jeffrey Kline.”

*    *    *

“Ethan tells me you were present when the verdict came in?”

“Yes,” said Justin.

“What was that like?”

The four of us had moved to the Captain Ahab Bar. As wine bottles flowed and ebbed to and from tables in the dining room, the Moby Dick crowd was getting drunk and rowdy. We had escaped to the quieter lounge to talk about Haddon. With candles on wooden tables, nets and harpoons on the walls, the bar was supposed to capture the flavor of Melville’s Lahaina.

“You’re a lawyer,” Justin said. “You know what it was like. The almost-sickening tension in court as the jurors filed in. They were pale and nervous. Only one—Busby—looked at Peter. The foreman delivered the verdict in a tired voice. No sooner had he rendered it than Peter exploded in court. ‘You call this a justice system?’ he yelled at the judge. ‘Where’s the goddamn justice in it for
me?
’”

“Was Haddon removed?”

“The court adjourned for sentencing. Peter was crying as they led him away. The father of the dead child cursed Peter’s attorney. ‘No champagne this time, pal,’ he said.”

“Did you report the proceedings?”

“No,” Justin said. “I didn’t enter the case until the appeals ran out.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I guess I believed in justice.”

Justin, Alex, and I were drinking coffee in the bar as the ship turned west. A compass sunk in the tabletop tracked direction. Already drunk and sulking because of my earlier put-down, Ethan was ordering one stiff drink after another.

“Easy,” I said.

“Mind your own business, Jeff.”

“Why did the appeal process fail?” asked Alex.

“The authorities were convinced that the right man had been convicted. Haddon’s lawyer saw to that by leading evidence of insanity at his trial. That’s how everyone knew for certain that Peter was the killer, and that became a strong dynamic in the state’s pursuit of him through the upper courts.”

“A psycho child-killer?”

The reporter nodded. “Peter’s lawyer had overplayed his hand. The jury had legitimized the state’s case with its verdict. The defense was forced to allege that Anna’s father and the two snitches were lying, that the hairs and fibers didn’t match or the lab had botched the job, that the wagon driver had not heard Peter admit to underage sex, and so on. That gave the state its rebuttal. What the attorney for the appellant was alleging was a huge conspiracy involving civilians, scientists, police, and prosecutors—all to railroad an innocent man.”

“It does sound outlandish,” Alex admitted.

“The courts thought so too. With so many bits of evidence pointing to Peter, it seemed too coincidental to be coincidence. Either he was guilty or he had the worst luck in the world. As it turned out, he
did
have the worst luck in the world.”

“It’s hard to overturn a jury verdict,” I cut in. “Jurors are the triers of the facts, and once evidence is weighed by them to determine the facts of any case, an appeal court won’t set the verdict aside unless you can undermine it.”

“Which the defense couldn’t. Once the verdict was in, the state’s case hardened.”

“Testifying under oath makes witnesses hunker down,” I said. “Lying in court is perjury. That can send you to jail.”

“A decade passed between Anna’s death and Peter’s hanging. In that time, DNA testing was invented. Semen stains were found on Anna’s underwear, but the science wasn’t refined enough by 1993 to get a workable sample to compare with Peter’s DNA.”

“Time ran out,” I said.

“Because there was a deadline. Had Washington not revived the death penalty, Peter would have been alive when refined DNA testing became possible.”

“So how do you fit in?”

“As it became obvious that the courts wouldn’t come to Peter’s rescue, his only hope became a pardon from the governor. By then, I was crime reporter at the
Seattle Star
, so he summoned me to death row and begged for my help.”

“Investigative reporting?”

“In a way. I tried to interview the father of the dead girl about why he changed the crucial time he said he got home, but George Koulelis refused to let me in. Having struck out there, I tried to find the snitches, but both had been released from jail, thanks to having testified against Peter, and had disappeared back into the woodwork.

“Finally, in a last-ditch effort to influence the governor, I wrote the usual polemic about capital punishment. I began with a quote from Clarence Darrow, in the hope that America’s all-time greatest lawyer could undo the damage Peter’s counsel had done:

Every human being that believes in capital punishment loves killing, and the only reason they believe in capital punishment is because they get a kick out of it. Nobody kills anyone for love.

 

“I finished with words to the effect that killing was a cruel, brutal, barbaric act. As state-sanctioned vengeance, it didn’t deter crime, and it was the enemy of justice because it was so irrevocable, irreparable, and ultimately final that it prevented correction of those mistakes that slip through the system.

“The governor didn’t respond, but I got a lot of hate mail. And someone sent me a quote by Ambrose Bierce to counter Darrow’s: ‘A hangman is an officer of the law charged with duties of the highest dignity and utmost gravity.’”

“That was the end of the line?”

“Yes,” Justin responded. “Peter asked me to spend his last hours with him. It was snowing on Valentine’s Day when I arrived at the prison. I expected to find a psychological wreck. But what I found was a man facing death with dignity. You know that famous quote from Dr. Samuel Johnson in 1777: ‘Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’

“That’s what Peter was like in those final hours. Just before the priest came to give him last rites, he asked me as a last wish to prove he was innocent after he was hanged.

“I was in tears.

“I promised I would.

“That night I wrote an article that was published the next day in the
Seattle Star
.”

“This article?” I said. And from a vest pocket in my barrister’s robes I pulled a photocopy of the newspaper piece Ethan had shown me earlier that day at our office:

“I’M INNOCENT!”—CONVICT’S LAST WORDS

HADDON HANGS

Justin Whitfield

Seattle Star

Walla Walla—He stood before us on the gallows of the state penitentiary, a moment before the hangman cinched the noose around his neck and dropped him to his death, to protest his innocence one more time.

“My last words are—”

His voice broke.

“That I am innocent, innocent, innocent. Be under no illusion. This is injustice. I owe society nothing. I am—”

He choked the words.

“An innocent man. Something wrong is taking place here tonight.”

Then it was over. Peter Brice Haddon was dead. And now I am left with the nagging suspicion that the State of Washington hanged an innocent man …