Authors: Steve Jackson
Love Me To Death (22 page)
Tara had thrown herself into her studies to become an emergency medical technician (EMT). Sometimes Angie’s death didn’t seem real. She’d drive by Angie’s old apartment and nearly stop, thinking,
I should go see if she’s home.
Then she’d remember and it would hurt all over again. For a year, she’d seen a counselor to help her cope with anxiety attacks.
I should go see if she’s home.
Then she’d remember and it would hurt all over again. For a year, she’d seen a counselor to help her cope with anxiety attacks.
All because of Cody, she thought as she approached the witness stand and considered bolting for the defense table to try to kill him. But she knew she’d never get there or accomplish the task. All she could do was continue forward and be sworn in before taking the stand. She looked at Neal and was overwhelmed by a feeling of disgust. If only he knew how sick just looking at him made her feel.
Tara described how her sister’s murder took away her “zest for life” just three weeks before her marriage. “Angie was always smiling. She was always happy,” she recalled for the judges. “All she wanted was a nice, healthy home for herself and her children. And someone to care for her, love her, and treat her with respect.”
She testified that she’d met Cody once “and was not impressed. I thought he was full of bullshit.” But her sister believed his lies “because she wanted all that so bad.”
At one point, she said, Angie had mentioned that she thought Neal was going to ask her to marry him. But toward the end, she was ready to get away from him. “She said, ‘I’m about there,’ ” Tara said.
Frequently, as Tara testified, she turned to face Neal, her eyes blazing with hatred. He couldn’t hold her gaze. But he wiped at his eyes, as did many in the gallery, when she recounted how when Matt Rankin told Angie’s son Kyle, five, who was responsible for killing his mother, the little boy cried, “No, Cody was my friend. He bought me a bear.”
Matt Rankin would take the stand to testify how Angie was the “only woman I ever really loved.” The prosecution did not dwell on how many times he’d been arrested for hurting her.
Lastly, Betty Von Tersch walked slowly to the witness stand. After Angie’s death, Betty had lived under a cloud so long that she wondered if she would ever see the sun again. She cried every day and talked to her murdered daughter, asking for her help. Like Tara, she sometimes forgot that Angie was gone . . . would think about calling her or going by to visit. . . . Then reality would return and so would the tears.
Valium kept the nightmares at bay for the first couple of weeks. When they came, most she could not remember, other than they left her disturbed and depressed. However, there was one that she recalled in which she entered a house filled with men wearing black shirts and black ties. “Mafia hit men” were the words that came to her sleeping mind. All the men were dead, having killed each other; their bodies, the walls, the floors were covered with blood. Angie was in the basement, hiding, as Betty Von Tersch had hoped to hear in those days following the arrest of Neal.
“You’ll never believe what happened, but I’m OK.”
“You’ll never believe what happened, but I’m OK.”
Sometimes she wished she could be with her eldest daughter. But there were two reasons to push on: Kyle and Kayla. They’d been told about their mother’s death, though spared the details.
It was for the two of them, and her love for her surviving daughter, that Betty Von Tersch found the strength to keep going. Now she just wanted the three black-robed judges to know her daughter. Angie, she began, was a straight-A student and “a good little girl.”
Angie had told her that she thought Cody might have been a hit man for the mob, but that it was in the past and even then he had “only gone after bad guys.” When she asked her daughter when she could meet this mysterious man, Angela had replied that he wasn’t ready to meet her family yet.
On Saturday, July 4, Angela was happy; the next day, Cody was going to show her “the surprise he had for her.” It was the last time that they ever saw each other.
“Everybody handles it a little differently,” Betty Von Tersch told the judges. “Everybody hurts a little differently. I’ve cried almost every day for a year and two months.” Kyle cried, too, she added. Kayla, too young to grasp what happened, toddled around the house, hugging pictures of her mother, picking up a toy telephone to call her mother “in Heaven” to say, “I love you, Mommy.”
Betty had also prepared a letter for her deceased daughter.
“To My Dearest Little Angel Angie,” she read aloud, “I miss you so much. I wish I could physically just see you and talk like we used to, hold you and let you know that everything will be OK, even if only for one minute.
“When I learned of your death, a darkness prevailed over me for many months and at times reoccurs. When Cody took your life, he also took a huge part of me that can never be replaced. At that point, my life changed forever.
“Every day I try to accept the fact that you are gone and you are not coming back. Someday, after time, I think that peace will come to me. I cannot accept the tragedy that happened to you. No one deserves to die the way you, Candace, and Rebecca did. Not one of you girls wanted to die. You did not have the chance to make that choice.
“I do know in my heart that even though we have had those beautiful memories of our happy times dimmed by life’s hardships and struggles and the darkness and gloom of a gruesome tragedy, that the love and bond between a mother and daughter never dies.
“The loss of a child is the most painful experience a mother will ever endure. . . . There are a lot of missing pieces to this whole thing that I still do not understand and may never, until I see you again. Please give me, and everyone in our family, the strength to understand this so we can someday have a normal life again.
“For the rest of my life and even beyond, I will do everything I can to love, protect, and care for your babies, Kyle and Kayla. I love them as much as my own children. It breaks my heart to know your children will grow up without their mother. They have been deprived of the love, hugs, kisses, and comfort of their mom. Your family is giving them that for you with all we have to give.
“Sweetheart, you never deserved what happened to you. You were a person who had a heart of gold and cared about people. Unfortunately, this awful thing did happen and now we all have to deal with what lies ahead. . . . I love you, sweetheart. My heart and soul are with you every minute of each day. I miss you so much.”
As Betty Von Tersch read, tears streamed down the faces of the families in the gallery as they tried to stifle small cries. Neal again wiped at his own eyes. In his opening statement, he had asked for “reconciliation and forgiveness.” His answer then, and as Betty climbed down from the witness stand, was a resounding no.
“Your Honors,” Tingle announced, “the state rests.”
Nineteen
September 25, 1999
William Lee “Cody” Neal’s defense was short, just a handful of witnesses. Like a real lawyer, he called each witness to the stand, and asked each to “state your full name and spell your last name.”
The first was Byron Plumley, Neal’s spiritual adviser since August, when he called the professor at the university and expressed remorse for his actions. Plumley began his testimony with a caveat, “I can only say what I’ve seen and heard.” However, he added, Neal had “what you call ‘surrendered’ to God and the judgment of this court.”
When Neal asked him to describe his defense strategy, Plumley replied, “Your defense is rooted in what you believe that God is asking you to do,” and that included not cross-examining the government’s witnesses or objecting to prosecution evidence or testimony.
“All men have the spark of the divine in them,” Plumley concluded, saying to Neal, “I believe that you have the spark of the divine in you as well.” But, he added, “only time will tell if your transformation is a permanent one.”
The rest of Neal’s witnesses were investigators and guards, who were called to testify regarding his behavior since his capture. One of those was Jose Aceves. Neal asked him if having met him, the investigator would have believed that Neal “fit the description” of the man who committed the murders.
“No,” Aceves acknowledged, looking as though he’d rather have his teeth pulled than be up on the witness stand, fielding questions from Neal.
“Do you believe that I’ve killed other people?” Neal asked.
“Based on information from you?” the investigator replied. “No . . . but we don’t know for sure.”
It wasn’t long before Neal had called his last witness. It was late Friday afternoon, and he asked the court for the weekend to think over whether he would testify. Judge Woodford granted him the time.
On Monday the court reconvened and Neal announced that he’d decided not to testify. If he did, the prosecution would have had the right to cross-examine him. However, he said he wanted to make a statement of allocution, which would not be given under oath or on the witness stand and therefore not open to cross-examination.
Standing at the defense table, Neal essentially repeated his opening statement. He noted that he lived up to his promise not to cross-examine the victims’ family members or other prosecution witnesses. He acknowledged that his crimes deserved no mercy, but said that he wanted to live so that he can “serve God in prison.”
He asked, “How could anyone have mercy on someone like me? To those three beautiful women that I ruthlessly murdered, I gave no mercy, or they would be here today. So I find it difficult to ask that of this court. The man that did that deserves none.”
But, he added quickly, he was not that man anymore. “My heart was stone, and only God can change a heart.” With that, he thanked the court and sat back down.
Charles Tingle rose from his seat and walked to the lectern to deliver his closing arguments. In the final analysis, Tingle believed that Neal’s demand to represent himself was based on several issues: one, that he was “throwing himself on the mercy of the court”; two, that if he received the death penalty, he could convince an appellate court to rule that he wasn’t competent to represent himself; three, and maybe the most indicative of Neal’s character, he was a control freak. In control of the women. In control of their money, their emotions, their lives. He tied his rape victim to a bed to control her. And now he wanted control over the proceedings to determine if he lived or died.
“Mr. Neal stated in his opening that when he committed the brutal, heinous murders of Rebecca Holberton and Candace Walters and Angela Fite, that on some level it was like casting a stone into a pond, that the ripple effect touched the lives of everyone.
“In retrospect, that stone was more like a bombshell and those ripples more like tidal waves. People have not been merely touched by the heinous murders that Mr. Neal committed. People’s lives have been shattered; their futures have been destroyed.
“It is not merely enough to say that they have been touched, or that there is pain, or that there is suffering.”
Tingle looked at Neal, who was leaning forward in his seat, listening carefully, and glancing up at the judges to gauge their reactions. Tingle shook his head. “I stand before you this morning with an impossible task,” he said. “That is, to adequately summarize how the defendant’s vicious slaughter of innocent women has impacted the family, has impacted this community, and to describe the magnitude of the loss of life for Rebecca Holberton and Candace Walters and Angela Fite.
“All too often in this business, this sometimes horrible business that we are in, we begin to distance ourselves from what has truly happened from the real human impact. . . . We sit here in the courtroom, a sterile environment, removed by many months, yet we try, through the evidence, to recall what happened, and we try to understand the impact of those crimes. . . . I have struggled and struggled to try to find words that adequately somehow relate what has happened in this case, and I can’t.”
Instead, he asked the judges to recall the words of the victims’ family members:
Dear Rebecca, I want to tell you how much I love you. I’m sorry I never really told you. We love you and miss you. We will never forget you. . . . Mom, there is so much I want to say to you, so many things I want to share. I am hoping that this letter finds its way to you somehow. There is no bond so sacred as a mother and daughter share. . . . My dearest little angel Angie, I miss you so much. I wish I could physically just see you and talk like we used to, hold you and let you know everything will be OK, even if only for one minute. When Cody took your life, he also took a huge part of me that can never be replaced.
What, Tingle asked, did Neal’s own words and actions say about his character? That’s one of the aspects, he noted, that the judges must base their final ruling on:
“He talked so calmly months later” during his interview with Aceves and Zimmerman “about how with each swing, Rebecca’s head got ‘sloppier and sloppier.’ ”
On July 1, Neal gave Holly Walters a big hug, he pointed out. “He was in a great mood as Rebecca Holberton lay dead in the living room of her town house.”
On July 3, with Candace Walters dead only a few hours, Neal was in such a good mood that he playfully asked Beth to marry him. “That someone can play a practical joke, hours after committing two savage murders . . . Does that say something about his character?
“Mind you, the defendant is good. He is good. Able to convince Rebecca Holberton, Candace Walters, Angela Fite, Suzanne, of unbelievable things.”
Pointing at Neal, who blinked several times and swallowed hard, Tingle said, “He knew Kyle and knew Kayla, and he murdered their mother.” The prosecutor placed the photograph of Angela Fite, still taped in the chair, back on the overhead. “What does it say about the character of a man who forced Suzanne into oral sex just inches from the body of a dying woman?” he asked.
The prosecutor played excerpts from Neal’s confession. “I was better than Bundy would have ever been. . . . I had a killer in me all my life. . . . A pale horse and the rider is Death with Hades following. That’s me.”
Tingle cautioned the judges not to believe Neal’s assertions that he had “turned back,” as he liked to quote a Turkish philosopher. “Those words have no meaning coming from him. He is a manipulator of the highest degree, a schemer, a con artist of unequaled ability.
“He does not deserve your mercy. Your compassion should be reserved for his murder victims. . . . The death penalty is justice. To be merciful and not impose the death penalty is wrong, for to be merciful to the cruel is to be indifferent to the good.”
Tingle took his seat. Judge Woodford asked Neal if he wished to make a closing argument. The defendant leaned over to Canney and said something to his advisory counsel, who shrugged. Neal shook his head. “I said what I wanted to say in allocution.”
And that was it. That was “the strategy” that Neal would not reveal to anyone. That was the end result of all those telephone calls, all that time in the law library, the stacks of death penalty materials that he’d demanded.
Woodford announced that judges would render their decision in two days, on Wednesday, September 29. The court was adjourned.
During their deliberations, the three judges found that the state had proved all of its aggravators, with only minor deviations. They then rejected all of Neal’s mitigators. More than that, they spurned everything that Neal had to say for himself.
They didn’t believe his claim to have been sexually assaulted in his youth. “Given William Neal’s pattern of habitual lying, the panel questions the accuracy of these events,” they wrote in the court order that would be handed down with the final sentence.
They doubted his remorse. “William Neal is so self-absorbed that his capacity for remorse is questionable.”
Nor were they impressed that Neal chose not to cross-examine family members in order to save them further anguish. “The panel discounts such concessions, given the overwhelming evidence, prearrest statements, and self-serving postarrest confessions.”
Even his religious conversion was “suspect, given the timing.”
They threw his words right back at him. “William Neal referred repeatedly to his religious conversion and cited the Bible during his allocution, requesting mercy and forgiveness. The panel also recalls that William Neal used the Bible in his statement to police: ‘It’s Revelation 6:8, about this pale horse, and on it was a rider, and his name was Death, and Hades followed him. That’s me, OK.’
“William Neal claims to be a changed man and, therefore, requests mercy. William Neal cannot point to the past as a basis for mercy but asks the panel to trust him in his promise toward the future. This panel is unwilling to do so. The panel relies upon the past as the best predictor of the future. William Neal’s plea rings hollow in light of his past deceits and evil deeds.
“All three murder victims in this case were warm, loving, caring individuals. Each, in their own way, was in a vulnerable position at the time they met and began to interact with William Neal. It is clear William Neal chose them in large measure precisely because of their vulnerabilities.
“All three murder victims came from close-knit families. They shared close bonds. The impact of this murderous slaughter on the families has been enormous. Their grief is immeasurable, and their loss incalculable. An integral part of each family member has been taken from them and can never be replaced. All have suffered tremendously. Beyond all of this is the fact that one day Angela Fite’s two children will learn the brutal way in which their mother died and, at that time, will have to deal with this horror yet again.”
For perhaps the first time in his adult life, Neal’s words had failed to move their intended audience. He was revealed, in his own words, as “just a stinkin’ liar.”
On September 29, 1999, the Jefferson County courtroom was packed as it had been on the opening day of the hearing. After he and the two other judges took their seats at the dais, Judge Woodford said he would not be reading the thirty-six-page findings of the panel. The panel was there only to announce their verdict.
Cody Neal’s eyes were fixed straight ahead on the panel, his hands clasped in front of him. As Judge Frank Martinez and Judge William Meyer stared down at the defendant, Thomas Woodford wasted no more time announcing that “the only penalty for the brutal, needless killing visited upon these kind and lovely ladies is death.”
Neal didn’t react, other than to blink repeatedly. A single, collective shout—“Yes!”—emanated from the family section of the gallery. Although he acknowledged that the verdict was an “emotional issue,” Woodford admonished the crowd to be quiet.
Then, a sudden fright: the lights went out and the courtroom plunged into complete black as spectators gasped. The lights came back on even as the deputies moved to surround their prisoner. William Lee “Cody” Neal would not be escaping his fate on their watch.
Neal was handcuffed and, without glancing back again, was led quickly out of the courtroom through a side door. The families and friends of his victims stood and left, pursued down the hallways by television cameras and reporters all seeking their reactions.
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